Wilson, M T (2020) Assessing voluntary resilience standards and impacts of flood risk information. Building Research & Information, 48(1), pp. 84-100. ISSN 0961-3218
Abstract
Voluntary resilience standards are an emerging tool for cities to incentivize developers to incorporate climate change adaptation strategies. Urban planners and researchers, however, are still assessing their relative impacts on the design of recent large-scale development projects. This paper answers the question of whether, and at what scale, anticipated changes to mapped flood risk are associated with mitigation actions to accommodate climate change. A case study of the Climate Change Preparedness and Resiliency Checklist in Boston, Massachusetts presents a database of 171 unique survey responses from 104 proposed projects. Comparing developments with documentation to an internal subset of 54 projects in the Boston Planning and Development Agency’s projected Sea Level Rise–Flood Hazard Area (SLR-FHA), this paper finds projects impacted by updated Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMs) are associated with different building uses, higher sea level rise assumptions and greater abilities to endure inundation. There are also neighbourhood-level differences in climate expertise and the projects' ability to withstand utility disruption. Both of these observed impacts may have important implications for the formulation and application of voluntary resilience standards in other coastal cities.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | climate change; floods; resilience; urban planning and design |
| Index terms: | emergency management, urban planning, planner, maps, case study, database, agency, scale development, survey, mitigation, adaptation, development agency, insurance, strategy, documentation, climate change |
| Subjects: | user focus, management, financial risk, economic analysis, data collection methods, sociology, data management, administrative law, climate science, measurement and scaling, urban planning, profession, spatial and geospatial analysis, professional development |
| Topics: | Information Management, Legal Issues, Cost Management, Governance, Digital Applications, Roles and Professions, Research Practice, Design Practice, Sustainability, Business Strategy |
| Descriptive scope: | 5 PCTEA |
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