New Tool Helps Infrastructure Planners Become Hazard Mitigation CHaMPions

Does your utility need help with hazard mitigation planning, especially with weather disasters? The Climate Hazard and Mitigation Planning (CHaMP) is an online, interactive tool intended to help local hazard mitigation, infrastructure, and land use planners integrate climate information into their hazard mitigation and other planning efforts.

CHaMP provides users with a single point of access to county, state, and region-specific historical climate and hazard data and projected climate information. Organized around climate hazard themes, it displays climate metrics, hazard data, and hazard impacts in a visual format with downloadable data visualizations and tables that are accompanied by explanatory text. Its outputs can be easily easily incorporated into hazard mitigation plans (HMPs), which are required for all grantees of FEMA. It covers New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Washington D.C., Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. CHaMP was codeveloped through a partnership between the Urban Sustainability Directors’ Network (USDN) and community partners of three Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) team. The developers anticipate future versions of CHaMP will be released as they continue to improve and enhance the tool’s functionality based on feedback from users. Access the tool on the champ.rcc-acis.org website and a user guide at RAND.