July 17 – County Planning Division – Tools to Visualize and Plan for Coastal Hazard Resilience – Speakers: Brandon Krumwiede, Lauren Long, and Rebecca Love

A major challenge for U.S. coastal and Great Lakes communities is planning for the impacts of current and future flood hazards. Quite a few counties continue to add residents and development at a time when planners are striving to safeguard natural resources and area economies, prepare for intensified natural hazards, and adapt to climate change impacts such as sea level rise. The first step in planning for these impacts is to understand your community’s exposure. Planners and decision makers need an easy-to-use and informative way to show potential impacts of lake level changes in the Great Lakes; ways to visualize and display where people, places, and natural resources are at risk from flooding along the coastline; and information about land cover change in order to improve understanding of past management practices, in order to effectively respond to environmental and human induced changes now and in the future. Tools planners are using to address these challenges can be found online Digital Coast, which hosts free data along with the training and tools needed to turn that data into useful information. Both the American Planning Association and the National Association of Counties are partners in the Digital Coast effort, which is led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). During the webinar easily accessible web-based products will be discussed as well as case studies of how they have been applied.  From this webinar participants will learn about the Lake Level Viewer, Coastal Flood Exposure Mapper, C-CAP land cover data, and C-CAP Land Cover Atlas.