Sponsor: Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)/State of Florida Division of Emergency Management (FDEM)
Award Contract Dates: 2019 - 2020
Total Award: $1,688,955
CES Awarded: $109,133
Project Narrative
Flood risk is broadly increasing throughout the State of Florida for numerous, compounding reasons, not least of which being accelerating climate change. This increasing risk has direct impacts on emergency management and spending but also has additional, indirect impacts on social vulnerabilities to flood-related disasters by degrading the level of service for unrelated “critical infrastructures”, such as roads and access to healthcare, and through increasing flood insurance premiums, which can reduce the total resilience of local communities to flood risk via rising costs of living and a reduced capacity for the tax-supported public services provided by local municipalities. Furthermore, the Federal systems for both defining flood risk and defining flood insurance premiums are not always well matched to actual flood risk in the real world.
In the case of the Federal government’s definition on the geographies of flood risk with models/maps (referred to collectively as “Flood Insurance Rate Maps” or “FIRMs”), due to the comparatively simplistic and poor resolution of the national models/datasets utilized by FIRMs, flood risk geography has and continues to be frequently mischaracterized at a local level, which can lead to over-estimated risk (and therefore, over-inflated insurance premiums) in some areas, and under-estimated risk (which can conversely create a lack of flood insurance coverage where it may be otherwise needed) in others.
This issue with inaccurate FIRM maps is especially pervasive in Florida where a porous limestone geology lies beneath much of the State, impacting actual flood risk geographies in ways not accounted for by the basic standards stipulated of FIRMs. Similarly, and relatedly, the policy and management activities provided by the Federal government to local governments for reducing a given municipality’s flood insurance premiums are not always known to or well understood by the relevant municipal managers, and those activities themselves may not even help to reduce flood risk in certain instances, particularly where FIRMs are inaccurate.
Furthermore, the tools and means required to overcome these limitations are rarely available to municipal managers, as such, it is common practice for cities and counties to outsource these efforts to private firms at great expense. This situation unintentionally fosters flood-risk inequity, as smaller and/or poorer municipalities naturally have a more difficult time achieving the Federal government’s standards for reducing flood insurance premium rates for their residents.
A synergistic approach for mitigating these compounding issues for Florida is to downscale and improve localized flood risk maps and to further help reduce flood insurance premiums by reducing the complexity and increasing the transparency for the policy and management actions stipulated by the Federal government for reducing flood insurance premiums generally. Providing tools and information that enhance the cross-jurisdictional planning capacity of relevant municipal managers with respect to watershed-wide flooding is the common approach framework for both of these objectives.
Project Summary and Objectives
In August of 2019, the Florida Department of Emergency Management (FDEM) contracted Florida Atlantic University (FAU) to accomplish two objectives: (1) to research and interpret policies related to flood risk, and (2) to better characterize flood risk state-wide. For the purposes of this project, “policies” were loosely defined as the projects, laws, initiatives, guidance publications, and programs that speak to flood risk management for the state of Florida or any community therein.
FAU’s Center for Environmental Studies (CES) was charged with this first objective and was specifically given two sub-objectives to better refine the intended purpose of this research: 1a) to comprehensively qualify how Florida community policies influence flood insurance premiums and identify pathways to reducing these premium costs and 1b) to develop a compendium of relevant information that can be used to construct a template for watershed management plans in the Florida context which could help to lower flood insurance premiums as well.
Project Approach
Research for this topic was initiated by CES as a review assessment of Florida’s collective community performance in the Federal Emergency Management Administration’s (FEMA) Community Rating System (CRS) program. The CRS program, as administered by the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), is a voluntary, points-based program that individual municipalities can engage with to petition the NFIP to reduce their community’s flood insurance premiums. Given a community’s performance on a wide-range of regulatory, infrastructural, and outreach criteria over a 5-year period, participating communities receive a CRS score from the NFIP based on a system of weighted points for specific “activities” conducted by that community. The intent for CES with phase “1b” of the FDEM funded project was to understand why FL communities that scored well in the CRS program did so and then to repackage those winning policy and outreach choices as a template of examples for easy implementation elsewhere in Florida, ostensibly providing pathways toward better managing community flood risk and thereby decreasing residents’ average flood insurance premiums. Given research sub-objective “1b”, a major emphasis during this phase of research was placed on the CRS activity that requires “watershed master planning” (WMP), which provides a significant portion of possible, available points within the CRS program.
However, after nearly a year of research in this respect, the principal investigators determined that focusing exclusively on the CRS program framework was not necessarily the most useful approach for helping communities to reduce their flood risk and the approach was altered. Following this change in, the research objective for CES then became to simply collate and synthesize a holistic policy perspective of watersheds in Florida that both incorporated and transcended jurisdictions within the watershed.
Project Outcomes
CES results produced as part of this research effort were three fold:
