Money Talks: Land Use, Value, and Hazard Mitigation
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Certification Maintenance
Learning Outcomes
- Identify the key challenges in determining the economic value of land use planning and regulatory approaches to hazard mitigation, especially in comparison with larger-scale structural and infrastructure mitigations.
- Understand how to convey the value of land use and regulatory approaches to hazard mitigation and climate adaptation in economic and financial terms.
- Utilize new approaches to make the economic case for land use planning and regulatory approaches to mitigating hazards and adapting to climate change.
More Course Details
In recent decades, natural disasters and their impacts on communities have been rising due to climate change and the expansion of urban areas into natural land, farmland, coastal land, and floodplains.
Various strategies can mitigate the potential negative impacts of natural hazards. They range from structural measures — such as diverting rivers through canals, floodwalls, and retrofitting buildings — to nonstructural strategies like revised land use regulations, guidelines, insurance, or building codes. Given the real-world costs and benefits of structural mitigations like infrastructure upgrades, nonstructural approaches may be favored over changes in land use or regulatory policies.
APA, in partnership with FEMA, is clarifying how land use and hazard-mitigation decisions are valued; finding links between land use planning and hazard mitigation; identifying approaches to cost-benefit analyses of land use planning; and highlighting successful or novel ways to value a land use and regulatory-first approach to hazard mitigation and climate adaptation.
Mitigating hazards is often expensive because strategies that consider the easily quantifiable costs and benefits of structural solutions are considered first. Discover how resource-constrained communities can recognize the economic value of a land-use-first approach to mitigating hazards.