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Louisiana Resilience Roadmap: Choosing a path toward a more resilient future
Citation:
Fulford, R., B. Dyson, AND Tim Canfield. Louisiana Resilience Roadmap: Choosing a path toward a more resilient future. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-24/028, 2024.
Impact/Purpose:
This report describes the structure and creation process for a Resilience Roadmap based on structured decision making and ecosytem services assessment. The report is designed to guide community leaders in the development of a location-specific roadmap useful for decision support on the quesiton of flood resilience. This report was created in collaboraiton with the Louisiana Watershed Initiative to support their efforts to foster new collaborative thinking in response to multiple flood events in Louisiana since 2016.
Description:
This document describes the proposed organization of a Flood Resilience Roadmap for the state of Louisiana. Its purpose is to lay groundwork for the development of a formal Roadmap in support of the Louisiana Watershed Initiative (LWI) Guiding Principles based on a Structured Decision-Making framework. This guidance document is organized around three Roadmap steps and includes links to supporting technical information through defined entry points for each Roadmap step. Origin – The Origin is about the characteristics of the community as a starting point for change. This includes assets and vulnerabilities, as well as plans and objectives not just about flood protection but about also for overall community well-being. Pathways – A roadmap shows multiple paths to get from Origin to achievement of collaborative resilience objectives, but how does a community choose the right path? Optimally there are several to choose from and the goal of the Roadmap is not to just pick one, but to consider all of the options against community priorities and goals. Destination – Choosing a destination is about the change a community wants to achieve based on established objectives. Improving resilience—which involves measurable change that can be compared to reference values for established performance measures—is defined during the Origins step to say we have in fact improved community resilience in meaningful ways. Defining the Destination is an answer to the question “What does community change look like?” The Roadmap vision is to develop an interactive, visual roadmap document that allows interested users to use the Roadmap to develop a formal flood resilience planning document at the local level based on Louisiana Watershed Initiative (LWI) guiding principles, stakeholder engagement, and EPA tools to quantify ecosystem services and human well-being. This guidance document elaborates on the roadmap framework with links to examples and sources. For additional reference, it includes results from an example exercise involving stakeholder discussions of inter-parish collaboration to improve flood resilience planning. This example is intended to demonstrate development of each step in the Roadmap and provide a starting point for development of a formal Resilience Roadmap in Louisiana.