Influences on Adaptive Planning to Reduce Flood Risks among Parishes in South Louisiana

Abstract

Residents of south Louisiana face a range of increasing, climate-related flood exposure risks that could be reduced through local floodplain management and hazard mitigation planning. A major incentive for community planning to reduce exposure to flood risks is offered by the Community Rating System (CRS) of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). The NFIP encourages local collective action by offering reduced flood insurance premiums for individual policy holders of communities where suggested risk-reducing measures have been implemented. This preliminary analysis examines the extent to which parishes (counties) in southern Louisiana have implemented the suggested policy actions and identifies key factors that account for variation in the implementation of the measures. More measures implemented results in higher CRS scores. Potential influences on scores include socioeconomic attributes of residents, government capacity, average elevation and past flood events. The results of multiple regression analysis indicate that higher CRS scores are associated most closely with higher median housing values. Furthermore, higher scores are found in parishes with more local municipalities that participate in the CRS program. The number of floods in the last five years and the revenue base of the parish does not appear to influence CRS scores. The results shed light on the conditions under which local adaptive planning to mitigate increasing flood risks is more likely to be implemented and offer insights for program administrators, researchers and community stakeholders.

Insuring homes against extreme weather events: a systematic review of the research

“…However, subsidies offered were not sufficient to enable lower income households to undertake mitigation, and higher income amenity migrants, whose properties were often second homes, tended to see insurance as a substitute for risk mitigation. Other studies echo the finding that insurance incentives are only effective in encouraging risk mitigation by the relatively affluent (Li and Landry 2014;Paille et al 2016;Osberghaus 2017).…”

Participation and non-participation in FEMA's Community Rating System (CRS) program: Insights from CRS coordinators and floodplain managers

“…Identifying the determinants of CRS participation-the focus of the present study-has also received some attention (see Ref. [12,16,17,20,46,49]. The results from the reviewed studies showed that communities participating in the CRS have greater flood risks and higher population sizes [16,20], educational attainment levels [9,17], incomes [18,19], tax revenues [17], proportion of senior citizens [17] as well as lower crime and unemployment rates [17].…”

“…Their study not only provides important information regarding the current state of knowledge on the CRS, but it also identifies research gaps and offers practical recommendations and policy recommendations to emergency and floodplain managers and policymakers, respectively [37]. This systematic review showed that scholars have examined various aspects of the CRS program, including whether the program is effective at reducing flood losses [7,[9][10][11][12][13]16,[38][39][40][41]), the value and effectiveness of specific CRS activities [9,10,13,[41][42][43][44][45][46], and the predictors of CRS scores, ratings, and points [20,43,[46][47][48][49][50]. Scholars have also examined the relationship between the CRS and disaster recovery [51,52], poverty and income inequality [53], as well as migration and development [54].…”

A review of the community flood risk management literature in the USA: lessons for improving community resilience to floods

“…Studies included under FEMA's CRS program indicate that local capacity, flood risk, socioeconomic characteristics, and political economy factors are significant predictors of initial and continuing participation in the CRS program (Asche 2013;Li 2011, 2018;Li 2012;Paille et al 2016;Sadiq and Noonan 2015a, b). This body of research also demonstrates that participation in FEMA's CRS program is indeed an effective strategy for reducing communities' flood losses Brody 2013, 2017).…”