Fresh guidance on managing environmental risks and relocation efforts along the US Gulf Coast is being given by top hazard mitigation experts less than one month after Winter Storm Finn triggered tornado warnings throughout the entire region.
Community-Driven Relocation: Recommendations for the US Gulf Coast Region and Beyond hits readers up front with an ominous reminder that the number of climate-related disasters doing damage to our southern shores has doubled every year since 2018.
Those calamities are part of what prompted the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to sponsor every bit of the work that went into getting this 467-page case study compendium published and pushed out to planners across the country.
Topics touched upon therein are almost all related to managed retreat—a concept covered extensively for federal agencies by Dr. Gavin Smith in Open Space Management Guide: Building Community Capacity to Program FEMA-Funded Housing Buyout Land.
That concept is meant to address the complex logistics and far-reaching consequences of uprooting communities situated in hazard-prone areas long before their residents are forced to flee from imminent disasters.
The necessity of having plans for restitution on the books before those disasters strike is stressed in each of the thirteen principal recommendations offered to readers in the eleventh and final chapter of this new release.
Local officials are likely to consider adopting those recommendations given that governments in other countries are already synthesizing similar preventative strategies suggested by investigators connected to the Coastal Resilience Center.