Planning Beyond the Status Quo to Build Resilience

About the Program

Category: County Resiliency (Best in Category)

Year: 2017

Broward County’s commitment to long-term sustainability includes enhancing community resilience and ensuring a viable future for generations to come. As such, Broward County has heavily invested in resources to help assess and plan for climate change effects. This resilience initiatives program has helped to effectively bridge the gap between scientific research and consequences for decision-makers and the public. In furtherance of adaptation efforts, Broward has collaborated regionally and with federal, academic and industry partners in resiliency planning including the US Army Corps of Engineers and the US Geological Survey. Through these partnerships, the County has invested in state of the art hydrologic and hydrodynamic models; regional planning tools to better understand the risk and vulnerabilities associated with saltwater intrusion, sea level rise, changes in rainfall patterns and storm flooding scenarios, better communication tools to explain these potential impacts to the public and decision-makers in a practical and visual way and scenario-based studies to evaluate adaptive strategies to mitigate the negative impacts. The resilience initiatives program began by building a framework for resiliency supportive policy, progressed by empowering stakeholders with information and encouraging ownership of resilient design decisions across agencies, and is transitioning the County into the implementation phase through the development of a set of resiliency standards and strategy for investments. The program demonstrates a successful process by which intergovernmental cooperation can be promoted to address hazards and future environmental conditions for the benefit of facilitating effective policy to increase community resilience. Successes of the program include a more secure water supply, guidance for improved drainage design, collaboration across sectors to address interconnected vulnerabilities, and the basis for regional standards for coastal infrastructure.