FEMA released the 2020 National Preparedness Report, which deals only with actions taken in 2019. In its ninth year, this report presents an updated, risk-focused approach to summarizing the state of national preparedness.  

The next National Preparedness Report, to be released late in 2021, will explore the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic and evaluate the response to it, reflecting the data that becomes available as the incident continues.

As an annual requirement of Presidential Policy Directive 8 and consistent with the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act reporting responsibilities, the National Preparedness Report has assessed the nation’s preparedness posture since 2012. This report provides partners across the nation with insights into risks, vulnerabilities and capabilities to support decisions about program priorities, resource allocations and community actions.

The report presents a discussion of the risks the nation faces and how those risks drive the nation’s capability requirements, the nation's capabilities to manage risks, including a high-level overview of the nation’s current capabilities. Also, the report includes initial results for the National Risk and Capability Assessment. The assessment meets requirements of the Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018, which involves tiered, capability-specific performance objectives to assess national preparedness.

The 2020 report found that affected communities may not be fully prepared to respond to nationally catastrophic incidents. However, an analysis of shared national capabilities indicates as a whole the nation is closer to achieving its national goals, despite some remaining capability gaps. The report also highlights some of the persistent challenges the nation faces, how the nation is working collectively to solve those challenges and what the nation must continue to do to build on those successes. It also provides a deeper assessment of four identified focus areas: cascading impacts, public-private partnerships, vulnerable populations and housing.

In Nov. 2020, FEMA announced the Phase 1 rollout of the National Risk Index (NRI), a new online resource that helps illustrate communities most at risk from natural hazards. This online mapping application analyzes risk factors from 18 natural hazards. Additionally, to provide a holistic view of community risk, the application includes expected annual losses, social vulnerability, and community resilience layers.

This release makes the underlying data available for use by state, local, tribal and territorial partners. The interactive mapping tool can help communities, especially those with limited flood mapping and risk assessment capabilities, better prepare for natural hazards by providing standardized risk data for mitigation planning and an overview of multiple risk factors. This data can help in developing a FEMA-approved hazard mitigation plan to help increase community resilience, which is a prerequisite requirement for applying for FEMA’s mitigation grants.

The tool determines risk by reviewing a community’s expected annual loss, based on hazard frequency, exposure, and historic loss rate; social vulnerability by measuring the susceptibility of impacted social groups; and community resilience, which measures the ability of a community to recover from, the impacts of natural hazards.

The index contains authoritative data from multiple federal partners and received input from more than 55 partners across the public and private sectors including state, regional and local government agencies; academia; private organizations; and nonprofits. Data were collected from best available resources between 2014 and 2019 and is expected to be updated in 2021.

The tool is free and easy to use, and data from the site is available for download.  FEMA is developing a comprehensive National Risk Index application to release later in 2021.  Visit FEMA’s National Risk Index webpage to learn more about the data and the natural hazards that can affect your community.

How did U.S. households fare in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic? Of people working in February who were living in households earning less than $40,000 a year, 39 percent reported they were laid off in March or early April. The Federal Reserve’s fourth issue of Consumer & Community Context features four articles presenting analysis of how consumers, communities and community development organizations have responded to the pandemic.

• The first article looks at select results from the most recent Survey of Household Economics and Decision-making (SHED), originally fielded in October 2019, and from supplemental SHED surveys fielded in April and July 2020 to measure the economic impact of the pandemic.
• The second describes the operations of community development financial institutions and their roles in responding to the pandemic.
• The third presents the results of an analysis of consumer complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau about their experiences with financial institutions.
• The fourth highlights the results of a survey of organizations providing services to low- and moderate-income communities during the pandemic.

Consumer & Community Context, an article series, features original analysis about the financial conditions and experiences of consumers and communities, including traditionally underserved and economically vulnerable households and neighborhoods. To subscribe to future issues of Consumer & Community Context, or for more information, email CCA-Context@frb.gov. For past issues, visit this link.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) launched the Clearinghouse for Environmental Finance (Clearinghouse), an online database of land, air, and water information, in December 2020. This new Clearinghouse catalogues available funding, financing, and instructional resources to aid communities in their efforts to improve environmental conditions. EPA’s Water Finance Center manages the Clearinghouse for Environmental Finance. The Center provides information on a suite of water sector financial topics, including through the Water Finance Clearinghouse, coordination among EPA and other federal water funding programs, and specialized support for communities requesting technical assistance for how to afford water infrastructure improvements. Additional information about EPA’s Water Finance Center is available at https://www.epa.gov/waterfinancecenter.

The Clearinghouse expands on the concept of the original Water Finance Clearinghouse, launched in 2017, that served as the one-stop shop for communities researching ways to fund and finance their water infrastructure needs to assist in local decision-making. The new Clearinghouse includes over 1,800 funding and financing opportunities and information resources from EPA’s air, water and land programs.  Communities can use this system to access information on funding and financing opportunities for environmental projects as well as financial research, such as case studies, white papers, and webinars. 

The public can access the Clearinghouse for Environmental Finance here: www.epa.gov/chef

Happy New Year, Recovery partners! What a year 2020 was, with the COVID-19 pandemic and the historic Atlantic hurricane season, which was the most active since record-keeping started in 1851.   

Although the COVID-19 pandemic is still raging, the FEMA Region 3 COVID-19 Interagency Recovery Coordination Task Force (IRC TF) sunsetted after eight months in operation at the end of December. Key highlights of the IRC TF are as follows: 

• COVID-19’s Impact on the Human and Social Services Sector White Paper resulted from the IRC TF’s work to understand the nature of the problems Region 3 states face regarding social safety nets. It looks at the ways in which this sector has been affected by the pandemic and raises awareness about issues critical to the safety and wellbeing of our citizens and the survival of nonprofit organizations that are straining to meet their needs at this time. 
• Through numerous listening sessions with the Planning District Commissions (PDC) and other partners in Virginia, the IRC TF learned that amidst the pandemic’s great challenges, there was much innovation and opportunity. The issues, impacts, opportunities, projects and planning efforts related to COVID-19 recovery identified in the listening sessions have been summarized in Virginia COVID-19 Recovery Issues and Opportunities, which also identifies technical assistance, capacity building, and other support needs, as well as state programs and resources allocations.

Through these initiatives, we have been able to build new relationships with partners in Virginia and nationally that are very important for recovery efforts now and in the future. 

As we start 2021 still in the midst of the pandemic, Region 3 continues to support Pennsylvania’s Recovery Support Function (RSF) structure and COVID-19 Long-Term Recovery Task Force to identify longer-term recovery objectives to guide their efforts into 2021. We're also working with our Federal Interagency Partners to highlight available programs and resources to support recovery efforts in our communities. And, lastly, as mentioned in our previous edition of Forward Recovery, we are increasing the frequency of the newsletter to monthly to keep readers informed of the ever-evolving recovery world. 

As always, feel free to reach out - either directly or to the Region 3 NDRF mailbox (FEMA-R3-NDRF@fema.dhs.gov). In the meantime, stay safe and take care!

Local officials, businesses, and residents who want to make their communities more resilient to hazard events – natural or otherwise – now can get straightforward, action-oriented guidance from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

A 50-page NIST Playbook identifies key actions that communities of any size can take to better position themselves to deal with potential hazards. It complements the two-volume NIST Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Physical Infrastructure Systems produced in 2015 that is used by communities and professionals in a variety of ways. The Guide recognizes that communities must prioritize their limited resources and that improving resilience is a process achieved over time.

The companion Playbook helps communities follow the Guide’s six-step process, which provides a structured yet flexible way to set community-scale goals, align priorities and resources, identify key stakeholders, and develop plans for recovery of community functions. The Guide and Playbook can assist communities seeking insights into resilience planning issues and help identify the most effective resilience projects and align community plans with resilience goals when seeking funds to support resilience activities.

The Playbook can be used without expert assistance, but also offers ways to engage experts in the planning and implementation stages. It focuses on key actions to accomplish each of the Guide’s six steps for resilience. The Playbook may also be useful for communities that wish to address only several of the steps – or simply to introduce the concept of the Guide’s planning process and the interdependencies of buildings and physical infrastructure systems.

The Playbook has supplemental materials and incorporates the experience of several communities that have put the Guide to use. It also points to complementary materials developed by other federal agencies, non-profit organizations, and states and localities. Appropriate links to sections of the Guide and supporting materials are included in “Useful NIST Resources” at the end of each section.

Plans provide visions for the future and the structure for making that future possible. But many communities are awash in a sea of plans, ranging across topic areas and local geographies and over widely varying timelines and implementation schedules. If the policies within these plans conflict, this can be especially problematic in the context of mitigating hazards and adapting to the impacts of climate change.

For climate and hazard resilience, ensuring that plans result in complementary policies that build resilience in at-risk geographies is crucial to long-term community health and safety. Though planners and planning departments may not control or oversee all plans in a community, they can play a major role in identifying and minimizing potential conflicts. 

This is easier said than done. Parsing local plans and understanding how they might conflict is a tall order. The sheer number of local plans may be daunting, they may address overlapping and ill-defined geographies, and their resulting actions and policies may be diffuse and difficult to quantify. These challenges are further heightened in resource-constrained communities that suffer from legacies of environmental injustice, racism, and inequality. How can planners ensure that the local network of plans is internally consistent and builds local resilience? How can this work be streamlined so that communities with significant constraints on funding, capacity, and resources can also engage in the work of plan alignment and integration?

This PAS Memo reports on research by the American Planning Association, in partnership with the University of North Carolina’s Coastal Resilience Center, that shows how planners can use the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard (PIRS) — an innovative tool developed by Phil Berke and Jaimie Masterson at Texas A&M University for understanding and assessing the internal consistency of local plans through spatial analysis — to improve community resilience and reduce vulnerability to hazards and climate change. Download the PAS Memo at this link.

NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) has launched a redesigned US Drought Portal to better serve stakeholders, decision makers, the media, and the public. The new website features updated content and new interactive architecture designed to provide actionable, shareable information and easy-to-understand graphics describing current drought conditions and forecasts by city, county, state, zip code, and at watershed to global scales. The Drought Portal also aggregates and presents drought impact data for economic sectors such as agriculture, energy, water utilities, and recreation using interactive maps and data that don’t exist anywhere else. The portal also has drought conditions down to the city and county level where you can see current conditions, key indicators of drought, outlooks and forecasts, and historical drought conditions. The portal also contains historical data and maps, including U.S. Drought Monitor data going back 20 years.

The Eviction Prevention Cohort launched in 2020 as a partnership between National League of Cities (NLC) and Stanford Legal Design Lab (“the Legal Design Lab”) in an effort to assist cities confronting a housing and eviction crisis that disproportionately impacts communities of color. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for cities to design, implement and institutionalize effective policies and programs to combat the root causes of evictions took on a heightened level of importance. 

Operating over the course of six months, NLC and the Legal Design Lab led the cities of Grand Rapids, MI; Norfolk, VA; Richmond, VA; Philadelphia, PA; and Pittsburgh, PA in hands-on technical assistance, virtual learning meetings, and peer-to-peer resource sharing and collaboration. By bringing together a diverse group of interconnected stakeholders across each city — including staff from housing and health agencies, legal services, courts, academic, community-based organizations and philanthropy — the participating cities tapped into the full ecosystem of stakeholders working to reduce the risk and impact of evictions.  

The program and the efforts of participating cities are detailed at length in The Eviction Prevention Cohort: Highlights from the Five-City Pilot. This report includes specifics about the Cohort and the technical assistance provided and offers a snapshot of the eviction landscape faced by each city. The report also charts a path for expanding, replicating, and refining these efforts. Read the full report here. Click here to read the report. For more information about the Eviction Prevention Cohort, click this link. 

The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) released a new publication from the Public Private Partnership on Disaster Mitigation and Recovery: 2019-2020 State Legislative Report on Natural Disasters.

Informed by in-person and virtual convenings and ongoing coordination among partnership members, this comprehensive new report provides an overview of enacted state disaster legislation for the 2019-2020 legislative session and highlights ways states and federal agency partners can work together to support mitigation activities.

As natural disasters increase in frequency and intensity, state policy has become a primary conduit for solutions. Disaster seasons of the last few years have broken records across the board. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria and over a dozen others made 2017 the costliest hurricane season on record. The nation’s deadliest and most destructive wildfire season was 2018 and 2020 featured megafires unlike anything the nation has seen. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation averaged nearly 12 “billion-dollar” disasters annually over the past decade―up from less than five per year between 1980 and 2009. Total damages over the past five years exceeded $525 billion—an annual average of around $106 billion.

In the face of these growing costs, state legislatures are balancing competing priorities to fund and reform disaster mitigation and recovery in their states. In 2019 and 2020, states enacted over 200 bills relating to natural disasters. At least 70 of these bills improve infrastructure resilience, from roads and bridges to the energy grid, building codes and emergency communications. At least 100 bills enact broad emergency management reform from administrative changes to intergovernmental coordination and transparency.

Despite the ongoing challenge of balancing competing priorities for limited funding within state budgets—made no simpler by historic pandemic-induced budget shortfalls—over two-thirds of states enacted at least 95 bills appropriating funds or creating financial incentives for resilience activities. This report discusses state legislative trends in broad emergency management reform, finance and appropriations and infrastructure.

The Disasters Partnership was established in the wake of the 2017 disaster season, which highlighted both challenges and opportunities within intergovernmental coordination, public policy, and the role of the private sector in emergency management. The partnership brings state legislators representing disaster-affected districts, or serving as their chamber’s public safety chairs, together with expert legislative staff and private sector partners to explore disaster policy solutions. This and other partnership resources, partnership membership, and schedule of partnership activities are also available on the partnership’s webpage.

New Mitigation Action Portfolio Showcases Pre-Disaster Mitigation Projects

FEMA recently published the Hazard Mitigation Assistance (HMA) Mitigation Action Portfolio to share information on successful pre-disaster mitigation (PDM) projects and help communities win funding for their own projects.

In September, FEMA announced a new pre-disaster hazard mitigation grant program called Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC). The HMA Mitigation Action Portfolio not only introduces the BRIC program, it also highlights successful pre-disaster hazard mitigation projects from across the country. These case studies show the broad range of possible projects that can be funded. Each case study includes a summary and project details such as cost, primary and secondary benefits, partnerships, project timelines, challenges and resources. Mitigation topics include coastal and inland flooding, drought, wildfire and other natural hazards.

BRIC is part of the National Mitigation Investment Strategy, which is FEMA’s national strategy for increasing mitigation investment to reduce risks from natural hazards. Replacing the existing PDM program, BRIC is intended to invest in projects that use innovative partnerships to produce multiple resiliency benefits. FEMA hopes the portfolio will inspire applicants to consider additional benefits beyond protecting life and property from disasters and think boldly when it comes to building resilient communities. 

Delaware River Basin Commission Takes Interstate Approach to Climate Change Threats

The Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) is a unique federal-interstate agency charged with overseeing a coordinated approach to water resources management in the watershed draining to the Delaware River and Delaware Bay. More than eight million people call this watershed home, and more than 13 million rely on its waters for their everyday needs. The DRBC brings together commissioners from New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to cooperatively manage and improve these waters. Program areas include water quality protection, water supply allocation, regulatory review (permitting), water conservation, watershed planning, drought management, flood loss reduction, and recreation.

In late 2019, the DRBC created a new advisory committee to evaluate the threats posed by a changing climate and recommend coordinated measures to adapt to these threats. The Advisory Committee on Climate Change (ACCC) is tasked with providing scientifically based information to assess climate change vulnerabilities in the Delaware River Basin and to identify measures for mitigation, adaptation and resiliency. Vulnerabilities may include changes in the salt front in the tidal Delaware River (which could bring saltier waters to major water supply intakes), changes in the frequency and severity of flooding and droughts, and changes in habitat quality.

This year, DRBC selected 18 climate experts from its member states representing government, academia, business, scientists and watershed groups. The inaugural meeting of the ACCC took place in August and focused on reviewing the commission’s previous and ongoing projects related to climate conditions. The interdisciplinary members of the advisory committee will provide valuable climate and water resources insight as DRBC pursues an interstate approach to planning for changing future conditions.