Assessing voluntary resilience standards and impacts of flood risk information

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Floods
• resilience
• climate change
• urban planning and design

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Michael T. Wilson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4907-1550

Additional information

Funding

This work was conducted as a Doctoral Candidate and supported by the Boston Area Research Initiative Seed Grant as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) Emerson Travel Grant and Lynne Sagalyn and Gary Hack DUSP Fund.