Development of a Regionally Relevant Hazard Mitigation Planning Portal and Visualization Tool

Project Summary

FEMA requires all state, local, and tribal governments to have hazard mitigation plans in order to be eligible to receive federal disaster mitigation funding. As part of these plans, communities of all sizes and socioeconomic levels would benefit from including relevant, timely, and accessible historical and projected climate-related hazard information. However, to date, few are doing so. Few state and local governments have the ability or capacity to integrate climate information into these plans or other comparable planning documents. Historical data on frequency and impacts of hazardous events are often scattered across multiple data sources. Once data are located, appropriate interpretation can be challenging for public agencies whose staff are stretched thin. Climate projections from downscaled data or other methods require specialized expertise to handle and interpret such data–expertise that few municipalities possess.

The lack of appropriate climate data in the vast majority of these plans undermines the ability of these communities to adequately communicate their potential future vulnerabilities to their own residents and to state and federal authorities. This project intended to address the growing need for community support through the co-development of a nationally relevant Hazard Mitigation Planning Portal and Visualization Tool with the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN). The Mid-Atlantic Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (MARISA) team members previously partnered with USDN to develop a prototype portal to help USDN members integrate climate projections and relevant historical data into their FEMA Hazard Mitigation Plans and produce interpretative narratives to accompany data visualizations.   

The Climate Hazard and Mitigation Planning (CHaMP) Tool is a single entry-point for regional and county-level data on past hazard events and historical and future climate information to support the development of local or regional climate-related plans. The intended audience for CHaMP is any user who needs localized climate or hazard information, which includes but is not limited to: planners, emergency managers, engineers, consultants, climate service providers, community leaders, or residents. CHaMP was designed specifically to support the development of FEMA hazard mitigation plans, although the information can be used for any type of plan or document requiring localized climate or hazard information. Organized around climate-hazard themes, the tool displays climate metrics, hazard data, and hazard impacts in a visual format with downloadable data visualizations and tables that are accompanied by explanatory text. Users can navigate through the features of the tool from the CHaMP homepage, selecting a climate or hazard variable and setting the time period or interest, or by clicking a state and zooming in to a specific county. A key feature of CHaMP is the automatic creation of customized narrative text that can be copied and pasted directly into planning documents with localized descriptions of events or variables and quantifications of trends. Help is available by clicking on the question mark panel to view support resources and documentation. 

CHaMP version 1.0 was developed by three Climate Adaptation Partnership (CAP, formerly RISA) teams with funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and guidance from USDN. Earlier versions of the tool were tested and improved by local planners in the Carolinas, Great Lakes, and Mid-Atlantic regions.