Across the United States, communities and states are seeing increasingly frequent and debilitating instances of urban flooding. Traditional approaches to floodplain management often will not work for high population, densely invested areas. The ASFPM Foundation Board believes that addressing urban flooding represents one of the most significant and complex challenges facing flood risk management policymakers and practitioners today. The nation needs to consider integrated approaches that take into account not only physical, but social, economic and political impacts, in a planning context marked by increasing uncertainty due to a changing climate. The decisions made now and over the next two decades will profoundly affect our nation’s ability to manage flood risk, recover from flooding, and invest at a national, regional and local scale in structural and nonstructural approaches to managing flood risk.
