Exploring and defining resilience in Vermont: Town and regional disaster preparedness and planning

In 2011, the state of Vermont experienced flooding in the Lake Champlain Basin in the spring, and also from Tropical Storm Irene in late summer. In the wake of these events, the Vermont State Legislature passed Act 138 in 2012 and Act 16 in 2013. The former directed the Secretary of Administration to create a Flood Resilient Communities Program (10 V.S.A, § 1428(c)). The latter specified municipal-level actions to “encourage flood resilient communities” (43 V.S.A. § 4302(c)(14)). In 2013, the Lake Champlain Basin Program issued a report focused on flood resilience in the Lake Champlain Basin and the Upper Richelieu River. This report made policy and management recommendations to promote flood resilience (http://www.lcbp.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/FloodReport2013_en.pdf accessed 10/27/2017).

The United Nations Habitat Program defines resilience generally as “the ability of human settlements to withstand and to recover quickly from any plausible hazards” (https://unhabitat.org/urban-themes/resilience/ accessed 10/27/2017). In this presentation, we explore how the concept of flood resilience is defined more specifically through municipal planning and management in Vermont. We describe how municipal actions are assessed with the state-level Emergency Relief and Assistance Fund (ERAF) mechanism. Using an exploratory index calculated from ERAF compliance measures, we assess whether ERAF scores correlate with several factors including the relative impacts of Tropical Storm Irene. We also explore how Vermont’s Flood Resilience Checklist and the Vermont Economic Resiliency Initiative provide more detailed definitions of ‘resilience,’ and integrate both process and outcomes dimensions of the term. Finally, we consider the roles of regional planning commissions and the State of Vermont in supporting municipal level actions to increase flood resilience. We draw primarily on data from municipal records, regional planning commission websites, and databases compiled by the State of Vermont. We incorporate insights from informational interviews with regional and state-level authorities.

We conclude with reflections on the challenges of implementing measures for resilience across scales of governance. We propose next steps to more fully understand how we can define and implement concepts of flood resilience in the Lake Champlain Basin and in Vermont more generally.