Gilbert F. White National Flood Policy Forum (2019)
Increasing Our Resiliency to Urban Flooding
In March 2019, the ASFPM Foundation hosted a two-day policy forum in the Washington, DC area to address urban flooding. The high-level question the forum sought to answer is:
How can we be better equipped as a nation to deal with
rapidly increasing flood risk in urban areas?
rapidly increasing flood risk in urban areas?

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.