Summary

The federal government invests in household flood resilience and recovery through multiple channels before, during, and after flood events. Primary federal programs include the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), grants for property elevation and acquisition through the Hazard Mitigation Assistance (HMA) portfolio, and post-disaster assistance through the Individuals and Households Program (IHP). As floods become more intense and frequent, and as development in harm’s way has continued to grow, spending on these programs has been increasing. While researchers have identified strengths and weaknesses associated with these individual federal programs, little is known about how they relate to one another, or whether participation in one program affects participation in others or reduces costs to another.

In Year 10, we will build on our work from prior years to investigate household and community access to flood resilience funds on a more comprehensive scale. In Years 8 and 9, we compiled and analyzed North Carolina government records on flood mitigation assistance to identify how federal funding is distributed across households and neighborhoods and its relationship to prior exposure to flooding. This research is providing new insights into the challenges that some households and communities face in accessing those funds. For example, because local governments must apply on behalf of residents, households in communities that lack the capacity or willingness to do so have no way of accessing federal grant funds. In other instances, households may be interested but the cost-benefit analysis disqualifies their application.

By incorporating other public flood resilience programs, our research in Year 10 will be able to speak to the full societal burden of flooding. While ensuring access to hazard mitigation funds is extremely important, even if a household or a community has not previously accessed HMA funds, they may be benefitting from other federal flood resilience and recovery support programs. For example, if they are insured through the NFIP, they may have little need or incentive to apply for additional mitigation funds. On the other hand, it may be that the same neighborhoods that lack access to mitigation funds also are under-insured. In Year 10, we propose expanding the scope of our research to assess those possibilities. Understanding the relationships between different federal programs and who/how households are participating is critical to advancing U.S. flood resilience and ultimately reducing the societal costs of floods, rather than shifting the burden across different actors.

First, we will analyze relationships between pre-disaster mitigation programs, specifically the NFIP and HMA. In Year 9, we evaluated the distribution of the HMA and its relationship to past flood exposure. Now, we will incorporate insurance coverage as neighborhoods that have high insurance coverage may have lower incentive or need for structural mitigation measures such as elevations or buyouts.

Second, we will examine how pre-disaster mitigation activities relate to needs for post-disaster IHP assistance. In this analysis, we will use the flood footprints from Year 9 to adjust for the extent of flood damage within a geographic area so that we can compare IHP applications across areas with similar flood damage, but very different use of HMA and NFIP. One hypothesis is that areas that have received mitigation funds and are well-insured will have less need for post-disaster federal assistance; however, those households may be under-insured or still experience damage despite some past structural mitigation. Our assessment will indicate which of these scenarios is occurring in NC.

Finally, we will analyze other states to assess the generalizability of our findings. Ideally, we could conduct this cross-state comparison at the address scale as we have address-level data for insurance and HMA in North Carolina. However, we have not yet been able to obtain comparable address-level data for other states. Between now and the project start, we will continue exploring pathways for obtaining that data so that we can more accurately understand similarities and differences between NC and other states. However, if we cannot obtain address records, we will do this cross-state comparison with the aggregated data made available publicly by FEMA.

Investigators