Hot off the presses in Natural Hazards Review is our brand new paper looking at the municipal financial impacts of floodplain buyouts! This is the result of a UNC Policy Collaboratory-funded project with two former students, Christian Kamrath and Brooke Ganser, and long-time colleague, hazard researcher David Salvesen. While the journal editors are apparently quite old school and re-wrote the paper to be completely passive (“it was discovered”. Ugh…), here’s the abstract:

Floodplain buyouts—the acquisition and removal of flood-damaged homes—have become increasingly important in federal disaster policy. However, there has been little research on how buyouts fiscally impact local governments. Buyouts can reduce future disaster-relief costs, create valuable open space, and reduce maintenance costs where urban infrastructure can be permanently removed. Conversely, buyouts can reduce property tax revenues and saddle municipalities with new buyout property maintenance costs. What are the range of potential fiscal impacts of buyouts on municipalities? This paper seeks to address this question while establishing a user-friendly process for estimating accurate impact ranges. The authors assessed the fiscal impacts of buyouts in eight North Carolina case-study communities, developing and testing a scenario-driven spreadsheet model to explore how community characteristics, policies, and strategies for buyout program design can affect the fiscal impacts of a buyout over time. It was discovered that fiscal impacts depend on at least three key factors, including (1) the spatial distribution of the acquired properties, (2) whether buyout participants relocate within their community, and (3) the management and maintenance regimes of acquired properties.

We’ve finally published our work that begun at a 2012 workshop sponsored by the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative.  While this project looked generally at how we can incorporate ecosystem service concepts into planning in the United States, we first looked at stormwater management as a starting point:

BenDor, Todd K., Vivek Shandas, Brian Miles, Kenneth Belt, and Lydia Olander. 2018. Ecosystem Services and U.S. Stormwater Management: An Agenda for Improving Urban Stormwater Decisions. Environmental Science and Policy 88: 92-103 | LINK

Abstract: Green stormwater infrastructure (GI) is gaining traction as a viable complement to traditional “gray” infrastructure in cities across the United States. As cities struggle with decisions to replace deteriorating stormwater infrastructure in the face of looming issues such as population growth and climate change, GI may offer a costeffective, efficient, and sustainable approach. However, decision makers confront challenges when integrating GI within city plans, including uncertainties around GI capacity and maintenance, resistance to collaboration across city governance, increasingly inflexible financing, accounting practices that do not incorporate the multiple values of GI, and difficulties in incorporating ecological infrastructure into stormwater management. This paper presents an ecosystem services framework for assessing the context-specific needs of decision makers, while considering the strengths and limitations of GI use in urban stormwater management. We describe multiple dimensions of the planning system, identify points of intervention, and illustrate two applications of our framework – Durham, North Carolina and Portland, Oregon (USA). In these case studies, we apply our ecosystem services framework to explicitly consider tradeoffs to assist planning professionals who are considering implementation of GI. We conclude by offering a research agenda that explores opportunities for further evaluations of GI design, implementation, and maintenance in cities.

Some of our other work on this topic has been published earlier, including:

BenDor, Todd K., Danielle Spurlock, Sierra Woodruff, and Lydia Olander. 2017. A research agenda for ecosystem services in American environmental and land use planning. Cities 60 (Part A): 260-271 | LINK

Salzman, J, Arnold, C, Garcia, R, Hirokawa, K, Jowers, K, LeJava, J, Peloso, M, and Olander, L. “The Most Important Current Research Questions in Urban Ecosystem Services.” Duke Environmental Law & Policy Forum (2014): 1-47 | LINK