Being neither prepared for Hurricane Sandy nor equipped with needed resources resulted in extensive flooding in New Jersey that led to deaths, dislocation, substantial economic and environmental losses, and power outages. The Resilient NJ project for the Atlantic County Coastal Region (ACCR), funded by HUD’s National Disaster Resilience Competition, promotes collaborative regional planning. The project aims to improve flood resilience and help towns and counties formulate creative, interlocal solutions to flooding issues that affect both the human and natural aspects of this seaside urban center. The ACCR project created new planning tools and mechanisms to help reduce future impacts.
Presenters share approaches that included community engagement with a listening phase that was essential to collecting soft data and local experience. Their presentation covers visioning, analyzing risk, prioritizing vulnerable assets, reviewing resilience options and designs, and developing scenarios. They illustrate collaborative methods to engage local governments and a range of proposed, long-term, regional resilience improvements to protect the coastal region and intensify interlocal response planning and coordination.
NPC Peer Reviewers assigned this presentation a learning level of Intermediate. For more on learning-level descriptions, visit our General Information Page.
Learning Objectives:
Apply innovative planning methods to build interlocal capacity for resilience to climate change in coastal settings.
Create effective risk-assessment analyses that consider both vulnerability to flooding and its consequences and impacts.
Create outreach and engagement programs that reach across all vulnerable populations, land-use types, and extensive cultural diversity.
