Educational Needs for Disaster Recovery Planning

Planners rise to the challenging task of preparing their communities for disasters and rebuilding afterward. Their ability to confidently plan for disaster recovery directly impacts their communities' resiliency.

In "Planning for Disaster Recovery: Planner Perspectives and Experiences" (Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 91, No. 2) Michelle Annette Meyer, Siyu Yu, Joy Semien, Shannon Van Zandt, and Shannon Burke surveyed U.S. planners on their roles in pre– and post-disaster planning. They found that more experiential knowledge in recovery planning is needed across the planning profession.

Community resilience following a disaster is closely linked to the roles and responsibilities of planners. As the costs of disasters rise and the need for better recovery planning increases in urgency, planners must elevate their role in disaster recovery.

This requires planners to see themselves as leaders of disaster planning and to be equipped with disaster planning knowledge and hazard specialization.

This survey found that 60 percent of respondents had no experience in making pre– or post-disaster plans, although 62 percent did have experience undertaking recovery activities.

While the execution of post-disaster plans is more common, pre-disaster planning can be more thoughtful and thorough, implementing more impactful planning tools. These findings highlight a prime opportunity for providing increased guidance to current planners.

Figure 3. Recovery plan writing experience by respondent training, specialization, and recovery experience. Note: All significantly different at p < .01.

Planning For Future Disasters

Education should encourage planner leadership in recovery and foster the implementation of planning tools in pre– and post-disaster plans. New educational materials for recovery planning should focus on equity, health, and housing, as these are the areas in which planners expressed the least knowledge.

The authors also encourage emphasizing education in recovery funding. Disaster recovery is an expensive process, and recovery funding was found to be a specific knowledge gap among planners in the study.

Planners need more exposure to funding beyond FEMA's Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, including HUD Community Development Block Grants-Disaster Recovery and FEMA's public and individual assistance programs.

The authors encourage planners and allied professionals to be surveyed every five years. If recovery educational programs are implemented, longitudinal surveys could provide pre– and post-test evaluations of the effectiveness of educational interventions.

Furthermore, the authors call for continued research and comparisons of pre– and post-disaster plans. They propose that this could shed more light on how these plans and plan-making processes fundamentally differ and ultimately improve communities' resilience.

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