Building Resilience Through Plan Integration

This episode centers around the idea that for communities to become more resilient — especially to hazards like flooding, drought, or urban heat — it’s not enough to create plans in silos. Different plans (comprehensive plans, hazard mitigation, climate action, etc.) need to be integrated. And that integration must happen before adoption and implementation in order to avoid conflicting goals or missed opportunities.

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One key tool discussed is the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard, developed as part of APA’s planning tools. It helps local governments evaluate how well different city or county plans are aligned with building resilience, identify gaps or conflicts, and better coordinate across departments. Why integration matters:

• Avoiding contradictory policies: A plan for walkable, dense development might conflict with a hazard mitigation plan that flags frequent flooding in the same area. Without integration, you could be planning for growth in places especially vulnerable

• Leveraging existing plans & resources: Many communities already have various plans — climate action, land use, emergency response, etc. Rather than building new plans from scratch, integrating them allows for more efficient use of data, funding, and implementation capacity.

• Including hazards early and spatially: It’s important that hazards (flood, heat, drought) be considered spatially in planning — looking at maps, exposures, overlapping risks — so that land use, infrastructure, zoning, and capital investment reflect those risks.

• Bridging departmental silos: Different city or county departments often manage different plans; integrating means improving communication across them (public works, planning, emergency management, parks, etc.).