With a list of feasible options in hand, evaluate the costs, benefits, and your team’s capacity to implement each potential solution. Assess the expected value of each action against its likely costs.
Integrate your highest-value actions into a detailed plan to address your community's highest priorities.
Perform a mental walkthrough of the steps it will take to implement each action. Look for ways to combine and/or sequence actions that will maximize the protection they offer for as many assets as possible. Recognize the potential for unintended (negative) consequences to help you avoid them.
Actively engage groups from across the community. Describe the plan and work to build consensus on a series of actions they will support.
Raise the team’s perspective from thinking about a list of single assets to considering the bigger picture of your whole community. Examine your full list of actions and look for patterns and similarities among the entries.
Think about how you might combine actions intended to increase resilience for a single asset to protect several assets. Look for the most efficient sequence of actions to reduce risk across your assets.
Some groups may want to engage a risk management consultant to assist them with this process.
How much would cost it to repair or replace the assets that could be negatively impacted if the action is not implemented? What other consequences would the project help you avoid? Consider the documented losses that some locations have experienced from your location's potential hazards.
Explore NOAA's Billion-dollar disasters site
Be aware that estimating the potential financial benefit of intangible things such as ecosystem services can lead to a broad range of expected values. Also, in some cases, the expected value of reduced risk associated with an action may seem positive, but only because the action transfers or delays risk. For actions in your plan that do not show a positive expected value, return to earlier steps to seek another solution.
Before you invest in an action, you’d like to have some evidence that it will truly reduce risk. Once implemented, will the action reduce the probability of a negative impact from a hazard and/or the magnitude of a loss? Effective actions need to reduce one or both of these elements in order to reduce risk.
Most groups won’t have enough time or money to do everything they’ve identified. Compare your list of worthwhile investments to your budget and time constraints.
From your sequence of actions, try to identify a subset of actions you can implement with available resources that would yield a positive benefit-to-cost ratio. Consider that taking action to put an important and highly visible portion of your plan into effect may give you a “win” that could attract additional resources. As possible, anticipate any unintended consequences that could result from individual actions.
If your budget check indicates your feasible solutions wouldn’t be sufficient to build resilience, break your actions into smaller steps to identify the most effective solutions you could implement. Iterate as often as necessary, looping back to previous steps and giving further consideration to solutions you once discarded as infeasible. Figure out what it would take to get past the obstacles you perceived to put additional options on the table.
Develop a detailed timeline with clear milestones. Share the plan broadly and prepare to be responsive to queries from the public.
Decide which option(s) should be implemented in what order, and lay them out in a detailed plan. Actively involve community members who will invest in the plan. Recognize that some groups may take responsibility or make a major contribution for specific parts of the plan. Groups may also find funds, win grants, or recruit volunteers to implement various facets of the plan.
In building your timeline, consider a phased approach with discrete milestones. As the first steps can be among the hardest, you may want to include some easy-to-implement options early in the process to help you build a track record of wins. Include a strategy for communicating your efforts via press releases and/or social media. Make contingency plans for acknowledging and correcting strategies that don’t turn out as well as you planned.
Encourage people to formalize commitments of time and resources that will meet the timeline you’ve developed. Alternatively, be prepared to adjust your schedule to meet the community's abilities to find or contribute resources. Where possible, build in flexibility, alternatives, and redundancies to accomplish the most important parts of the plan.
Be sure to document your plan and share it widely. Include a narrative that summarizes
Ensure that your plan is transparent and inclusive: be sure to cite your sources for important data and information that isn’t common knowledge. Publish your plan at an accessible, easily accessible location.
Consider that any infrastructure project you plan, once underway, will have some impact on the community. Additionally, construction projects may temporarily exacerbate the impacts of some hazards. For example, project involving culvert installation, road construction, and other civil engineering may change the course of stormwater flows or restrict traffic movement. Ensure that you plan carefully to minimize disruptions that can result from implementing a solution.
