Guide to disaster resilience through risk-based land-use decisions
BACKGROUND
TAKE-AWAY MESSAGES
Eighty professionals in municipal land-use
evaluation, land-use policy and emergency
management created the rudiments of the first
Canadian guide to risk-based evaluation of land-use
proposals and urban growth strategies.
Risk-based land-use decision support has to be:
practical and applicable to the community,
based on Provincial and National standards
and methods, many of which do not currently
exist,
They did it in a workshop hosted by Simon Fraser
University's (SFU) Centre for Natural Hazards
Research, and various academic and professional
partners in Metro Vancouver, on September 17, 2010.
Ken Topping, a land-use planner from Los Angeles,
presented how California and the broader USA
support disaster prevention through land-use. That
presentation, participant's own experience, and
lessons learned from a land-use simulation exercise
hosted earlier in the week informed workshop
discussions.
based on community accepted levels of risk,
multi-hazard and integrated with existing landuse practices,
learnt through training, networks, and
reference material,
Practitioners told us what tools they needed to make
land-use decisions that could reduce disasters. Some
tools they wanted do not exist in Canada, such as
hazard and risk assessment standards and
methodologies, and mitigation evaluation criteria.
The group looks to their professional organizations,
and local, provincial and federal governments to
provide these missing decision-making tools. NRCan,
one of the workshop partners, currently is one of
several federal departments and agencies developing
risk assessment tools and standards.
This workshop is the first step in an iterative process
of consultations with professionals and other
stakeholders. Over the course of the coming year, the
risk assessment community of practice will build a
pan-Canadian risk-based guide to land-use
evaluation incorporating existing tools and creating
new ones.
L.C. Struik, J.J. Clague, M. Day, L. Pearce, L.L. Pearce, D. Allan, W. Hirlehey, C. Jeromin,
M. Journeay, N. Hastings, F. Dercole, M. Ulmi, J. Shoubridge
iteratively improved and revised to be useful,
inclusive of community involvement,
Summary of important points from risk-based land-use evaluation simulation Simulation conducted at the Justice Institute of British Columbia, September 13, 2010, by 15 staff from various BC municipalities in four separate pods using real land-use decision situations from the District of North Vancouver.
Lisa Arora: getthepicture.ca, Graphic Recorder
First reports from the workshop, are available at
http://www.sfu.ca/cnhr/workshops/index2.html
An experimental simulation exercise was held on
September 13, 2010 at the Justice Institute of British
Columbia in New Westminster. Municipal land-use
planners, emergency managers and engineers
worked together to evaluate several actual
development proposals in a hazard prone area. The
workshop was conducted by Natural Resources
Canada's Public Safety Geoscience Program's Risk
Assessment team, in collaboration with SFU, UBC,
JIBC, the District of North Vancouver and Pearces 2
Consulting.
We watched how participants arrived at their
decisions, what sort of information they needed and
what tools the felt they were missing. Participants
identified these key findings: the importance of
having a multidisciplinary team of experts for landuse decision making, the need for national hazard
and risk assessment standards, a provincial standard
to define hazard zones for permitting, local standards
for acceptable disaster losses, and effective access
to hazard knowledge.
Summary of workshop breakout 3 - Land-use Guide Key elements for a risk-based land-use guide as defined by four multi-disciplinary breakout groups. Each group defined the elements in one of four parts of a standard decision pathway, the general layout of which, with sticky notes, is shown below.
Lisa Arora: getthepicture.ca, Graphic Recorder
Participants praised the simulation process, and
wanted to be involved in additional exercise
scenarios based on smaller communities with less
risk assessment capacity. Lessons learned from this
simulation were used at the workshop that same
week, to build a guide for risk-based land-use
evaluation.
PLANS
Notes were made on place mats and flip charts
Lots of of notes
Lots of charts
Summary of workshop breakout 2
Evaluation by four multi-disciplinary breakout groups of the best practices in risk-based landuse decision support. Discussion was guided by the four themes: Knowledge access, Risk determination, Decision making, and Governance. Ideas from this breakout were taken into the session to create a guide to best practices in municipal risk-based land-use evaluation.
Lisa Arora: getthepicture.ca, Graphic Recorder
The group that hosted this workshop plans to create, over the course of a year, a draft risk-based guide to land-use evaluation for disaster reduction. Material from the 2010 workshop and simulation would be presented for feedback at various national conference venues. The manuscript would be iteratively reviewed by municipal stakeholders in land-use proposal evaluation. The group would host a follow-up workshop in 2011 to evaluate the land-use decision support tools, and to host risk-based land-use evaluation simulation exercises in laboratories and over the web. The Justice Institute may lead the simulation development and operation as a professional development opportunity. 97 people registered for the workshop.
Most were emergency managers,
municipal land-use planners, municipal
engineers, and academics and
government researchers and
stakeholders in land-use and disaster
reduction.