MEASURING THE ADOPTION OF DEVELOPMENT MANAGEMENT POLICIES AS AN INSTRUMENT OF DISASTER MITIGATION TOWARD RESILIENT COASTAL COMMUNITIES IN FLORIDA

Coastal hazards have been known as the scariest group of hazards, monsters that threaten 39% of the nation population and in less than 10 years. With the current population growth, the monsters will harm almost half of the nation’s population (45% to be exact) and uncountable properties placed at only 17% of land area of the country. The threat of coastal hazards has never been low, but it keeps rising because no human being in this world can prevent, stop, contain or avoid the hazards from happening. But, there always are ways to lower the risk and the loss with an effort called mitigation. The mitigation effort has been done through many ways, and one of the most popular ways is by incorporating it into comprehensive planning both at the state and local levels. Local level comprehensive planning has been seen as more directly impacting policies, because the community becomes more directly involved during the process of envisioning their future. While this research focuses on coastal areas and coastal hazards, coastal management is another concern and considerably involved in supporting the disaster mitigation effort. Hazard mitigation, coastal management, and the local comprehensive plan are three crosscutting efforts and joined forces that can be need to create a more resilience coastal community. In an effort to measure how the three crosscutting tools have been adopted in managing the development in vulnerable coastal areas, a matrix was developed to empirically examine 35 local comprehensive plans of the coastal counties in the second largest U.S. coastal state, Florida, to see if sets of development management policies have been regulated in the coastal management element of comprehensive plan documents. The findings of this research show that the moderate total score percentage of most jurisdictions (30 counties) policies adoption, ranged from 26%-75% and 60% of the total jurisdictions (20 counties) adopted 50%-74% of the overall policies which indicate that in general, most jurisdictions have paid moderate attentions in integrating hazard mitigation, coastal management and comprehensive plan. Among 18 sub-policies measured in the coastal management element of the comprehensive plan studied in this research, sensitive land protection, relocation effort and siting public facilities at hazard free areas appear to be the most adopted policies by the jurisdictions, with an adoption rate more than 50%. Even though only 6 policies out of 18 sub-policies got attention less that 50% in the coastal management element. Especially the elements like hazard disclosure and warning signage at the hazardous areas need to be considered and added in the element because of their critical functions for hazard mitigation efforts. The result of this research is not the only way to measure the adoption of development management strategies by coastal counties. There are many other documents like coastal management plan and program, emergency plan, and hazard mitigation plan those also incorporate development management strategies. This research specifically evaluates development management strategy adoption in coastal management element of the local comprehensive plans. Adviser: Zhenghong Tan