Impacts of Local Government Perceptions of Disaster Risks on Land Resilience Planning Implementation

Local government managers play a critical role in sustainability and climate adaptation planning, and in relation to land-use policy, but little is known about how managers’ hazard risk concerns influence the implementation of resilience policy or how this relationship may vary across different landscapes and types of hazards. Linking managers’ disaster concerns to their planning choices is particularly relevant to resilience planning for adaptation to climate change, since greenhouse gas emissions are global but the harms produced by climate change are local. Moreover, climate adaptation planning encompasses risks from multiple hazards. For a sample of cities in the state of Florida, USA, we report the findings of empirical analysis of the relationships between local government managers’ hazard-specific climate-related disaster concerns and their resilience-planning priorities for four types of hazards: river flooding, sea-level rise, storm surge and hurricane/tornado winds. Drawing on data from a survey of local disaster managers and policy data on the implementation of adaptation-planning actions, the link between managers’ concerns and plan implementation is identified and compared across communities and across types of hazards. The pooled logit regression results reveal that the differences observed among these hazards persist even after controlling for objective risks and relevant community characteristics. We discuss the nature of the differences across four hazards and explore the implications of the findings for the literature on land use and climate adaptation and for the education of local government managers.