Community-Centered Resilience: Lessons from Louisiana

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The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) held a briefing on community-centered resilience featuring an example from Louisiana which holds lessons for all regions of the country. Across the United States, communities are facing increased uncertainty from changes such as shifting agricultural growing seasons and intensifying coastal erosion. These changes hit close to home, and communities should be at the center of finding solutions to increase their resilience.

Louisiana’s Strategic Adaptations for Future Environments (LA SAFE) took on this challenge. The initiative addresses community resilience holistically by integrating risk planning with planning for stormwater management, housing, transportation, economic development, education, recreation, and culture.

Using a ground-breaking approach to community adaptation planning, LA SAFE, which is a collaboration between the Louisiana Office of Community Development and the Foundation for Louisiana, held 71 community meetings and engaged with over 3,000 people in coastal Louisiana. Together, the communities developed adaptation plans and voted on pilot projects, which jumpstarted the initiative’s implementation stage funded by federal Community Development Block Grants.

Briefing panelists discussed the process and outcomes of the LA SAFE initiative to date to provide attendees with an understanding of how this model can be applied in districts across the country

 

HIGHLIGHTS

 

Liz Williams Russell, Coastal Community Resilience Director, Foundation for Louisiana

• The Foundation for Louisiana is a statewide philanthropic intermediary meant to pull in resources from a diverse set of spaces, in order to bring those resources to places impacted by disasters.
• A central question of this work is to deal with the reality that residents with resources can pick up and move, while others are unable to do the same because they have limited resources.
• It is important to give a central place to community voices in planning projects.
• Logistically, one needs to think about the scale and frequency of meetings, the barriers to people being involved, such as child care and the accessibility of reading materials.
• People in a community do not want to talk about the disappearance of their lands with people from outside their communities. Such conversations should not be held by someone who is not from the area. The information needs to be communicated by someone whom communities know and trust.
• As its first step creating community-centered planning, the Foundation for Louisiana launched a leadership and development program, Lead the Coast, around coastal development, race and leadership, organizing training, and advocacy training.
• There were three cohorts of Lead the Coast graduates by the time the LA SAFE program was started. These graduates were eligible to lead LA SAFE planning meetings and were paid $15/hour stipends to do that work.
• As a result of the leadership training, people had conversations about these topics around dinner tables, community meetings, and Sunday brunches.
• The Foundation for Louisiana worked to get the blessings of people from each Parish. In order for people to play ball, it needed to engage with community members first.
• Philanthropy often has lots of money for research, but not for implementation of projects.
• The Foundation for Louisiana focused on the best ways to build out civic engagement infrastructure and support local engagement.
• The Foundation for Louisiana is also beginning to invest in research and analysis of population trends, climate change impacts, and what tipping points might occur in terms of financing and the ability to find insurance.

 

Mathew Sanders, Resilience Policy & Program Administrator, Louisiana Office of Community Development – Disaster Recovery Unit

• Louisiana is a disaster-prone state, and it suffers from sea-level rise and loss of landmass. We need to think from a development perspective about land-use patterns, particularly about how land-use relates to land loss from sea level rise.
• There is a social aspect in the way people react to disaster risk: People who have the ability to be mobile in the face of disaster usually move, while others who do not have the resources to move, do not get to make the decision to move or not.
• For LA SAFE, we had a planning process and then community members voted on the first projects to fund. We put the decision back to the public.
• The public is intelligent and able to refine concepts in land use and development, and can understand often complex land data.
• Louisiana is now investing in 10 different projects after our year-long process of outreach and engagement.

 

Elder Donald Bogen, Jr., Organizer, Bayou Interfaith Shared Community Organizing

• “When you have to relocate, it’s like a death. It plays on your mental, and physical well-being.” Since it is such a tough topic, relationships and trust are essential to having these conversations and making the decision to move.
• LA SAFE focuses on relationships, and long-term impacts on social networks.
• Community leaders were brought in, trained, and held debates on the issues.
• Community member relationships with LA SAFE allowed for more effective conversations with faith leaders and government leaders.
• When you educate a community, its members can become some of the best minds for coming up with solutions. They are local experts.
• When you can get us into the room to highlight issues, then give us resources to solve the issues, then invite us to have conversations with our communities, we can provide solutions.
• Coastal land loss hurts entire communities. The LA SAFE process highlights what our communities have in common.

 

Dr. Justin Kozak, Researcher and Policy Analyst, Center for Planning Excellence

• The Center for Planning Excellence works at the state level and the local level, and was excited to work on the LA SAFE plan because it merged those perspectives together.
• The foundation of the LA SAFE planning process was data and modeling coming from the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA).
• CPRA data allows us to see far into the future, and to invest and plan for the long term. The multiple timescales allow us to see what would change over time and prioritize the steps that need to be taken.
• Most communities at the local level do not have the capacity to develop a plan like this, nor the resources to keep these programs going over time. This can be problematic because long-term thinking is needed for long-term planning.
• Land-use decisions, taken individually, are rational, but when those decisions are added together, they can lead to an irrational result (i.e., a flooded community). In a country where most places do not have the capacity to plan long-term, it is hard to make sure that land-use decisions do not become irrational in the aggregate.
• Drivers of change like sea level rise and land-use are slow, and because of that, it can lower the sense of urgency for taking action.
• State and federal policies do not directly line up with local needs. Agencies have specific missions and try to stay in their lane, but the issues addressed by LA SAFE cover a series of overlapping issues.
• We need stability in institutions, but the nature of these disasters requires institutional flexibility.
  • Is the Department of Education looking into maintaining workable class sizes as more communities move to higher ground?
  • Is Health and Human Services prepared to shift their services to handle a demographically different population?
• The Center for Planning Excellence has identified three emergencies:
  • The real emergency—The immediate aftermath of disasters and the consequences of not taking action after a disaster hits. The visibility of this allows for real political confluence.
  • The conceptual emergency—This is climate change, sea level rise, etc., and it is harder to see. This emergency is the problem of managing changing systems and developing resilient systems. This is more difficult, since it is less visible and fights against the status quo.
  • The existential emergency—Involves changing worldviews, cultures, mindsets, and what constitutes progress and development in the face of climate change.
• There is no script for adaptation planning. The scale and scope of these problems (floods, disasters, sea level rise), are unique, and sea level rise is changing historical benchmarks that we would look at to plan for the future.
• Key ingredients for adaptation planning:
  • Good data and modeling—This is the easiest part. You get the best minds, put them together, and make models.
  • —Lead the Coast was this aspect in LA SAFE. There must be a conversation around the consequences of emergencies so that people can understand what we are actually dealing with.
  • —As we start these conversations, people will ask questions that we have not thought of yet. We need to be flexible enough to provide answers we have never given before.
  • —If Mat had come in and led meetings without the leadership of Liz, Donald, and community members, he would have had rotten fruit thrown at him. Instead, he was able to work with the community to make strategies and order priorities in the face of these emergencies.

 

Q&A Session:

What would you institutionalize from LA SAFE as others work to make plans like this?

• Engagement with communities on a broad conversation of strategies, creative energy, and brainstorming that comes directly from community members.
• Providing data, research prowess, and expertise, while involving the community as a part of solution generation.
• Institutionalize resources and toolkits, so practitioners will have the resources to implement their own strategies and work in ways that will work for them.
• The collaboration between organizations was essential.
• A variety of funding streams, both federal and from the state.
• Non-environmental sectors must be required to consider the impacts of their activities on communities and environmental change.

In terms of financing, there is a limited amount of money and I am concerned about insurance premiums and credit ratings. Are you dealing with any of those issues in LA SAFE?

• We are going to see an evaporation of real estate wealth in places like Louisiana, but, right now, we are still seeing investments being made that will diminish in value in the future.
• All planning at the state level should include an analysis of flood risk and sea level rise. Our Louisiana economic development groups have not considered the need to invest in higher-ground places.
• Risk is inadequately priced, partly due to the indecision regarding the National Flood Insurance Program.
• Unless we make sure that we are creating new resilience and adaptation sectors, the people who are in areas that need to move and adapt will not have the jobs and resources in order to build their own resilience.
• We do not need more government, we need to adjust day-to-day processes so that the understanding of long-term challenges are built into them.

Can you describe the coastal land-use plan and some of the projects that were voted on?

• Through the LA SAFE program, $40 million was invested in ten projects selected by the public. These included a business incubator, green infrastructure, a safe harbor, resilient affordable housing prototypes, housing credits, community development block grant funds, and a buyout program for residents outside of the Morganza line.

How much geospatial data does LA SAFE use for modeling, and do you leverage it at the state and local level as well?

• The question is not the availability of data, but the jurisdictional boundary of the data.
• It is virtually impossible for parishes to work together with the information they have because some have LiDAR from 15 years ago and some have LiDAR from 5 years ago. It is not possible to compare these maps and accurately reflect the reality on the ground.
• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is a great source of data.

How is the decision made regarding who stays and who relocates?

• That is the job of maps combined with community leaders bringing those maps to the community.
• It is not appropriate for the government to come into a community and tell people where they have to move. We told those communities that we do not have the answers. This is a community-building process and these decisions emanate from the communities themselves when presented with the data.

What kind of resources does it cost to do the community outreach planning that you did? My sense is that this was not cheap. How much would it cost to scale this up?

• This does cost money, but it is less expensive than doing nothing.
• Foundation for Louisiana spent about a million dollars, including time spent ahead and since, for six parishes. But, we did not provide the costs for the private contractors who did the planning work, so that is a question for the state. The state can pay for some things that we cannot, and vice versa, which is why partnerships are important.
• On the state side, we had about a $4 million investment, and this can be improved upon in the future because now we now know how to be more efficient.
• Community investing is hard, dirty, and expensive. This is a large investment monetarily, emotionally, and more. It is necessary, but not cheap.
• If we have stronger relationships at the beginning of the process, we can make this more efficient.

 

The LA SAFE model has already generated interested from the Chesapeake Bay and the New York metro area as well as the upper-Midwest and California. Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards is a strong proponent of demonstrating LA SAFE as a model for resilience work across Louisiana communities and the country: “Through LA SAFE, we are proactively working with our communities to plan for a more resilient future in the face of rising seas and continued flood risk. LA SAFE has taken a vital step by investing in community-driven plans that allow for holistic adaptation across various sectors, as well as offer a replicable model for Louisiana and climate-vulnerable communities everywhere.”