FEMA has published two flood-mitigation guides on nature-based solutions showing how communities can develop projects with multiple benefits.
Both are titled “Building Community Resilience with Nature-Based Solutions.” But one focuses on “Strategies for Success.” The other focuses on “A Guide for Local Communities.” Together, they build a case for integrating green and gray solutions to improve resilience.
While geared toward policy makers, planners and flood-mitigation professionals, they will also help community leaders, activists, students and anyone interested in weaving green solutions into flood mitigation, whether on the watershed, community or household level.
These are not technical guides. They focus on high-level benefits and are packed with helpful examples and case studies. The writing is clear, compelling and easy to understand.
“Strategies for Success” Summarized
Strategies for Success is organized around five major themes.
Building strong partnerships
Engaging the whole community
Matching project size with desired goals and benefits.
Maximizing benefits.
Designing for the future.
If you wonder what the term “nature-based solutions” includes, see pages 17-22. They complement gray (engineered) solutions in many ways in many environments.
At the watershed scale, they can include:
Land conservation
Greenways
Wetland restoration and protection
Stormwater parks
Floodplain restoration
Fire management
Bike trails
Setback levees
Habitate management
At the neighborhood or site scale, they include:
Rain gardens
Vegetated swales
Green roofs
Rainwater harvesting
Permeable pavement
Tree canopy
Tree trenches
Green streets
Urban greenspace
In coastal areas, they include:
Wetlands
Oyster reefs
Dunes
Waterfront parks
Living shorelines
Coral reef
Sand trapping
The section about maximizing benefits will help leaders sell such projects to their communities. It contains helpful tips that improve value and case studies that dramatize it.
The guides also come with links to additional resources.
“Guide for Local Communities” Summarized
This guide begins by reprising many of the same solutions mentioned above. Then it quickly moves into three main sections:
Building the business case for nature-based solutions summaries their potential cost savings and non-monetary benefits. They include:
Hazard mitigation benefits in a variety of situations/locations
Community co-benefits, such as ecosystem services, economic benefits, and social benefits
Community cost savings, such as avoided flood losses, reduced stormwater management costs, reduced drinking water treatment costs.
Planning and Policy Making covers:
Land-use planning
Hazard mitigation planning
Stormwater management
Transportation planning
Open-space planning
Implementation includes:
Boosting public investment
Financing through grants and low interest loans
How to incentivize private investment
Federal funding opportunities
Key takeaways include:
Communities that invest in nature-based approaches can save money, lives, and property in the long-term AND improve quality of life in the short term. Other key takeaways are:
The biggest selling point for nature-based solutions is the many ways they can improve a community’s quality of life and make it more attractive to new residents and businesses.
Diverse partners must collaborate.
Scaling up will require communities to align public and private investments.
Many types of grant programs can be leveraged for funding.
I’ll add one more: It’s easier to build these into communities as they are developing rather than retrofit them after the fact.
Local Examples
Regardless, the right combination of green solutions can make a valuable supplement to flood mitigation in every community.
The 5,000 acre Lake Houston Park provides recreational amenities and flood protection to surrounding areas.
Many great examples of a nature-based solutions surround us locally. Look at Lake Houston Park; Kingwood and The Woodlands which have greenbelts and bike trails along creeks; the Spring Creek Greenway; and the Bayou Land Conservancy’s Arrowwood Preserve.
Recreational asset and flood-mitigation project.
Parks like Kingwood’s East End make more great examples. East End preserves wetlands, accommodates tens of thousands of visitors each year, and provides valuable habitat for wildlife.
Interested in getting more projects like this started near you? As a starting point, please share these brochures with leaders in your community. And support local groups seeking to preserve green spaces such as the Bayou Land Conservancy.
Two nights ago I started to hug my wife. “Not tonight,” she said.
“What’s wrong,” I asked. “Headache?”
“No,” she sighed. “Climate change.”
The temperature in the room dropped about 10 degrees.
“I see what you mean,” I said.
Ironically, the next morning, I opened the New York Times to an article by Brooke Jarvis. The title: “Climate Change Is Keeping Therapists Up at Night: How anxiety about the planet’s future is transforming the practice of psychotherapy.”
It began with the experience of one psychotherapist to bring issues into focus. He said that many potential patients are looking for someone to talk to about climate change, only to be told (by others, not him) that they are overreacting.
Climate Psychology Alliance of North America and Eco-Anxiety
Enter stage left a group of about 100 “climate-aware” psychotherapists who call themselves the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America. According to Jarvis, they primarily deal with three types of issues:
Acute trauma of living through climate disasters
Fear of a collapsing future
Psychosocial decay from disruptive changes.
Collectively, they call it “eco-anxiety” or “a chronic fear of environmental doom.”
It’s not clear from the rest of Jarvis’ story whether the psychotherapists have reached any consensus yet about how to treat this emerging malady.
Conflicting Info About Breadth of Concerns
Jarvis cites a nationally representative 2022 survey of more than 1,000 people from Yale and George Mason University. Researchers found that a majority of Americans (64%) say they are at least “somewhat worried” about global warming.
However, Jarvis does not report that the same research also found about 90% of Americans experience no distress at all about global warming.
Should psychotherapists bring climate concerns up even when clients don’t? That’s not clear either.
But the climate psychologists agree that they should validate their clients’ climate-related emotions as “reasonable, not pathological.” The climate shrinks believe they should make clients feel their fear is a “rational response to a world that’s very scary.”
Link between Eco-Reporting and Eco-Anxiety Not Examined
While not denying climate change, I also personally believe the threat may be artificially exaggerated.
The New York Times article does not examine eco-reporting that contributes to eco-anxiety. Some days, I’m afraid to open a newspaper because I may find Republicans can’t elect a speaker…due to climate change. (Just joking.)
Comments on the New York Times article seemed polarized. About half felt eco-anxiety was justified. The other half felt it was manufactured by media.
In that regard, I have previously posted about the Associated Press policy of taking money from foundations with interests in renewable energy to hire 20 reporters who focus on climate change.
Before the Internet undermined local newspapers, news organization sold advertising to generate revenue that paid employees. Ads clearly showed client’s logos. News organizations jealously guarded their editorial integrity; news almost never crossed the line into advertising.
That’s no longer the case. Now, 20 reporters are looking for any way possible to connect random weather events to climate change…using the most tenuous of threads. And if they can’t find one, they say, “So-and-so worries that climate change may make his problem worse in the future.” But they present no real statistical proof.
Not to make light of anyone’s feelings or circumstances, as I scrolled through other headlines this morning, I learned that…
Droughtsmay intensify in the Amazon in the future…due to climate change.
Fewer young peoplemay fish in Alaska in the future…due to climate change.
Such stories are rapidly becoming a parody of themselves. Regardless…
Repetition Makes Claims Rise to Level of Assumed Truth
Through sheer repetition of such claims day after day, people assume their truth. Individual events such as a flood, drought, freeze, heatwave or windstorm may or may not exemplify larger trends. But reports rarely present actual proof they do.
Rather, they quote people who have suffered some kind of weather-related damage and who fear such events may become more common in the future…due to climate change.
Of course, who can disprove the future? That’s pretty safe ground for a reporter.
I asked one of the area’s leading psychotherapists in Houston to review the New York Times article. She replied, “Climate change didn’t come up once in my 40 years of private practice.”
Posted by Bob Rehak on 10/22/23
2245 Days since Hurricane Harvey
https://i0.wp.com/reduceflooding.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0205-e1698010167513.jpg?fit=1100%2C825&ssl=18251100adminadmin2023-10-22 16:53:292023-10-22 17:46:12Welcome to Climate Psychotherapy
Homebuyers beware. Flood risk is a shifting target.
This morning, I began reading more than 100 pages of legal briefs in the appeal of the upstream Addicks and Barker awards. I could not help but think how hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and untold heartbreak could have been averted with more due diligence on the part of all involved – buyers, developers and the Army Corps.
Background of Case
For those new to the area, Addicks and Barker are two reservoirs on Houston’s west side. The Army Corps built them back in the 1930s to protect downtown Houston and the ship channel. However, the Corps did not buy all the land inside the reservoirs that was subject to flooding. Later, developers started building on that land. And people bought the homes despite the risks.
During Harvey, hundreds of homes built inside the reservoirs flooded. Residents sued the Corps and won. But the Corps is now appealing the case.
In 2022, a judge ruled in favor of the residents and awarded them more than half a billion in damages. The damages included repair costs, replacement of belongings, and compensation for value lost in their property. But facing hundreds of millions of dollars in payouts, the government isn’t giving up easily. It appealed.
The case has taken more than six years to get to this point and it is far from over. No telling what the legal fees have cost both sides. Or whether plaintiffs will ever see a penny.
This should serve as a lesson to everyone buying a home and to their real estate agents, mortgage lenders, and surveyors.
Tools to Help You Avoid Becoming a Flood Victim
Although tools to identify flood risk may not have been commonly available and readily understandable when the plaintiffs bought homes inside the reservoirs, such tools do exist now.
They both show the extent of potential flooding in this area, but each has different strengths. And they show slightly different results. That should raise some cautions if you think of risk as a black-or-white issue.
Use USGS National Map for Elevations, Slopes, Contours
You can layer these maps and vary their transparency. But the real magic of the USGS National Map is in the measurement tool for elevation profiling. Below is an example.
After activating the elevation profile tool, I drew a line from a residential neighborhood inside the Barker Reservoir, across the dam, to an area outside the reservoir. I chose an area in the southwest corner of the reservoir that flooded during Harvey. It showed this.
Note elevation changes on right where line crosses the dam (gray bar). Homes above the gray are inside reservoir.
The red X shows the height of the dam (108 feet) in the elevation profile. The brown area in the elevation-profile box shows the elevation of the dam, homes, streets and drainage channels.
Homes are generally 6-8 feet BELOW the height of the dam. That should be a giant red flag for anyone considering buying a house inside the reservoir.
Next, zooming out, I turned on the hydro layer. The red circle below, indicated the approximate area and location of the map above.
Note how the flood pool of the reservoir extends beyond the entire neighborhood shown above.
FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer Viewer for Floodplain Information
FEMA actually uses the elevation information from the USGS national map. But FEMA superimposes floodplains to show flood risk in several zones.
Note difference in two maps above in their bottom left corners. FEMA shows some homes inside the reservoir that are outside of mapped flood zones. Aqua = 100-year and tan = 500-year floodplains.
The difference noted above raises an important point. FEMA’s maps are estimates of the probability of unknown future events based on the frequency of extremely rare past events. Those estimates may not have been in effect when the neighborhood in question was built around the time of Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. Maps based on Allison weren’t adopted until around 2007 and are still in effect today.
Harris County Flood Control and FEMA update flood maps periodically when new monster storms come along and surpass past rainfall probability estimates. For instance, FEMA is working on new flood maps based on Harvey, but has not yet released them.
So, if you’re thinking of betting your life savings on a home in a risky area, the best things to do are these:
Ask yourself, “Can I afford to lose everything?” Many families in the reservoirs did.
Consult an independent engineer without any financial incentive in the purchase, i.e., making the deal go though.
Evaluate a variety of homes, not just one. And look closely at the safety margins.
If a home is two feet above the 100-year floodplain, look for one that’s higher. Things change regularly, usually in one direction.
Make “flood avoidance” more important than kitchen appliances in your purchase decision.
A Cautionary Tale Based on Personal Experience
Back in the early 1980s, I owned a house in Dallas near a creek that an engineer and the city certified were 2-feet above the 100-year floodplain. The home flooded within two years, due to rapid, insufficiently mitigated growth upstream.
Several years later, when I bought a house in Kingwood, I looked at ten homes and bought the one on the highest ground. More than 30 years later, all nine of the others flooded during Harvey even though they were all reportedly above the 100-year flood plain.
For a thorough description of why flood risk is a moving target, read this post – Why Do We Flood?
After two years of drought, it’s easy to become complacent about flood risk. Don’t. Ask anyone who has flooded. They will tell you. Your life can change overnight. So homebuyers beware.
Posted by Bob Rehak on 10/21/2023
2244 Days since Hurricane Harvey
https://i0.wp.com/reduceflooding.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Barker-Hydro.jpg?fit=1200%2C842&ssl=18421200adminadmin2023-10-21 18:33:462023-10-21 18:57:57Homebuyers Beware: Flood Risk is Shifting Target
FEMA Publishes Nature-Based Solution Guides, Advice
FEMA has published two flood-mitigation guides on nature-based solutions showing how communities can develop projects with multiple benefits.
Both are titled “Building Community Resilience with Nature-Based Solutions.” But one focuses on “Strategies for Success.” The other focuses on “A Guide for Local Communities.” Together, they build a case for integrating green and gray solutions to improve resilience.
While geared toward policy makers, planners and flood-mitigation professionals, they will also help community leaders, activists, students and anyone interested in weaving green solutions into flood mitigation, whether on the watershed, community or household level.
These are not technical guides. They focus on high-level benefits and are packed with helpful examples and case studies. The writing is clear, compelling and easy to understand.
“Strategies for Success” Summarized
Strategies for Success is organized around five major themes.
If you wonder what the term “nature-based solutions” includes, see pages 17-22. They complement gray (engineered) solutions in many ways in many environments.
At the watershed scale, they can include:
At the neighborhood or site scale, they include:
In coastal areas, they include:
The section about maximizing benefits will help leaders sell such projects to their communities. It contains helpful tips that improve value and case studies that dramatize it.
The guides also come with links to additional resources.
“Guide for Local Communities” Summarized
This guide begins by reprising many of the same solutions mentioned above. Then it quickly moves into three main sections:
Building the business case for nature-based solutions summaries their potential cost savings and non-monetary benefits. They include:
Planning and Policy Making covers:
Implementation includes:
Key takeaways include:
Communities that invest in nature-based approaches can save money, lives, and property in the long-term AND improve quality of life in the short term. Other key takeaways are:
I’ll add one more: It’s easier to build these into communities as they are developing rather than retrofit them after the fact.
Local Examples
Regardless, the right combination of green solutions can make a valuable supplement to flood mitigation in every community.
Many great examples of a nature-based solutions surround us locally. Look at Lake Houston Park; Kingwood and The Woodlands which have greenbelts and bike trails along creeks; the Spring Creek Greenway; and the Bayou Land Conservancy’s Arrowwood Preserve.
Parks like Kingwood’s East End make more great examples. East End preserves wetlands, accommodates tens of thousands of visitors each year, and provides valuable habitat for wildlife.
Interested in getting more projects like this started near you? As a starting point, please share these brochures with leaders in your community. And support local groups seeking to preserve green spaces such as the Bayou Land Conservancy.
Posted by Bob Rehak on 10/23/23
2046 Days since Hurricane Harvey
Welcome to Climate Psychotherapy
Two nights ago I started to hug my wife. “Not tonight,” she said.
“What’s wrong,” I asked. “Headache?”
“No,” she sighed. “Climate change.”
The temperature in the room dropped about 10 degrees.
“I see what you mean,” I said.
Ironically, the next morning, I opened the New York Times to an article by Brooke Jarvis. The title: “Climate Change Is Keeping Therapists Up at Night: How anxiety about the planet’s future is transforming the practice of psychotherapy.”
It began with the experience of one psychotherapist to bring issues into focus. He said that many potential patients are looking for someone to talk to about climate change, only to be told (by others, not him) that they are overreacting.
Climate Psychology Alliance of North America and Eco-Anxiety
Enter stage left a group of about 100 “climate-aware” psychotherapists who call themselves the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America. According to Jarvis, they primarily deal with three types of issues:
Collectively, they call it “eco-anxiety” or “a chronic fear of environmental doom.”
It’s not clear from the rest of Jarvis’ story whether the psychotherapists have reached any consensus yet about how to treat this emerging malady.
Conflicting Info About Breadth of Concerns
Jarvis cites a nationally representative 2022 survey of more than 1,000 people from Yale and George Mason University. Researchers found that a majority of Americans (64%) say they are at least “somewhat worried” about global warming.
However, Jarvis does not report that the same research also found about 90% of Americans experience no distress at all about global warming.
Should psychotherapists bring climate concerns up even when clients don’t? That’s not clear either.
But the climate psychologists agree that they should validate their clients’ climate-related emotions as “reasonable, not pathological.” The climate shrinks believe they should make clients feel their fear is a “rational response to a world that’s very scary.”
Link between Eco-Reporting and Eco-Anxiety Not Examined
While not denying climate change, I also personally believe the threat may be artificially exaggerated.
The New York Times article does not examine eco-reporting that contributes to eco-anxiety. Some days, I’m afraid to open a newspaper because I may find Republicans can’t elect a speaker…due to climate change. (Just joking.)
Comments on the New York Times article seemed polarized. About half felt eco-anxiety was justified. The other half felt it was manufactured by media.
In that regard, I have previously posted about the Associated Press policy of taking money from foundations with interests in renewable energy to hire 20 reporters who focus on climate change.
Before the Internet undermined local newspapers, news organization sold advertising to generate revenue that paid employees. Ads clearly showed client’s logos. News organizations jealously guarded their editorial integrity; news almost never crossed the line into advertising.
That’s no longer the case. Now, 20 reporters are looking for any way possible to connect random weather events to climate change…using the most tenuous of threads. And if they can’t find one, they say, “So-and-so worries that climate change may make his problem worse in the future.” But they present no real statistical proof.
Not to make light of anyone’s feelings or circumstances, as I scrolled through other headlines this morning, I learned that…
Such stories are rapidly becoming a parody of themselves. Regardless…
Repetition Makes Claims Rise to Level of Assumed Truth
Through sheer repetition of such claims day after day, people assume their truth. Individual events such as a flood, drought, freeze, heatwave or windstorm may or may not exemplify larger trends. But reports rarely present actual proof they do.
Rather, they quote people who have suffered some kind of weather-related damage and who fear such events may become more common in the future…due to climate change.
Of course, who can disprove the future? That’s pretty safe ground for a reporter.
I asked one of the area’s leading psychotherapists in Houston to review the New York Times article. She replied, “Climate change didn’t come up once in my 40 years of private practice.”
Posted by Bob Rehak on 10/22/23
2245 Days since Hurricane Harvey
Homebuyers Beware: Flood Risk is Shifting Target
Homebuyers beware. Flood risk is a shifting target.
This morning, I began reading more than 100 pages of legal briefs in the appeal of the upstream Addicks and Barker awards. I could not help but think how hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and untold heartbreak could have been averted with more due diligence on the part of all involved – buyers, developers and the Army Corps.
Background of Case
For those new to the area, Addicks and Barker are two reservoirs on Houston’s west side. The Army Corps built them back in the 1930s to protect downtown Houston and the ship channel. However, the Corps did not buy all the land inside the reservoirs that was subject to flooding. Later, developers started building on that land. And people bought the homes despite the risks.
In 2022, a judge ruled in favor of the residents and awarded them more than half a billion in damages. The damages included repair costs, replacement of belongings, and compensation for value lost in their property. But facing hundreds of millions of dollars in payouts, the government isn’t giving up easily. It appealed.
The case has taken more than six years to get to this point and it is far from over. No telling what the legal fees have cost both sides. Or whether plaintiffs will ever see a penny.
This should serve as a lesson to everyone buying a home and to their real estate agents, mortgage lenders, and surveyors.
Tools to Help You Avoid Becoming a Flood Victim
Although tools to identify flood risk may not have been commonly available and readily understandable when the plaintiffs bought homes inside the reservoirs, such tools do exist now.
Two of the easiest to use are the USGS National Map and FEMA’s National Flood Hazard Layer Viewer.
They both show the extent of potential flooding in this area, but each has different strengths. And they show slightly different results. That should raise some cautions if you think of risk as a black-or-white issue.
Use USGS National Map for Elevations, Slopes, Contours
USGS excels at mapping elevations, slopes and contours. This post explains how to use the National Map. Backgrounds include:
You can layer these maps and vary their transparency. But the real magic of the USGS National Map is in the measurement tool for elevation profiling. Below is an example.
After activating the elevation profile tool, I drew a line from a residential neighborhood inside the Barker Reservoir, across the dam, to an area outside the reservoir. I chose an area in the southwest corner of the reservoir that flooded during Harvey. It showed this.
The red X shows the height of the dam (108 feet) in the elevation profile. The brown area in the elevation-profile box shows the elevation of the dam, homes, streets and drainage channels.
Next, zooming out, I turned on the hydro layer. The red circle below, indicated the approximate area and location of the map above.
FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer Viewer for Floodplain Information
FEMA actually uses the elevation information from the USGS national map. But FEMA superimposes floodplains to show flood risk in several zones.
The difference noted above raises an important point. FEMA’s maps are estimates of the probability of unknown future events based on the frequency of extremely rare past events. Those estimates may not have been in effect when the neighborhood in question was built around the time of Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. Maps based on Allison weren’t adopted until around 2007 and are still in effect today.
Harris County Flood Control and FEMA update flood maps periodically when new monster storms come along and surpass past rainfall probability estimates. For instance, FEMA is working on new flood maps based on Harvey, but has not yet released them.
So, if you’re thinking of betting your life savings on a home in a risky area, the best things to do are these:
A Cautionary Tale Based on Personal Experience
Back in the early 1980s, I owned a house in Dallas near a creek that an engineer and the city certified were 2-feet above the 100-year floodplain. The home flooded within two years, due to rapid, insufficiently mitigated growth upstream.
Several years later, when I bought a house in Kingwood, I looked at ten homes and bought the one on the highest ground. More than 30 years later, all nine of the others flooded during Harvey even though they were all reportedly above the 100-year flood plain.
For a thorough description of why flood risk is a moving target, read this post – Why Do We Flood?
After two years of drought, it’s easy to become complacent about flood risk. Don’t. Ask anyone who has flooded. They will tell you. Your life can change overnight. So homebuyers beware.
Posted by Bob Rehak on 10/21/2023
2244 Days since Hurricane Harvey