key terms and concepts

Adaptation: Implementing actions that seek to reduce the vulnerability of communities to the effects of natural hazards and climate change trends.

Business Features: The many parts that make a business run. By looking at how a hazard affects each feature, you can take focused steps to reduce risk.

Climate Change: Long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. While natural processes can contribute to climate change, the significant changes observed in Earth’s climate since the mid-20th century are driven by human activities, particularly fossil fuel burning, which increases heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere, raising Earth’s average surface temperature.

Climate Mitigation: Implementing actions that seek to limit the magnitude or rate of long- term climate change through reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate Vulnerability: The degree to which natural, built, and human systems are at risk of exposure to climate change impacts.

Environmental Justice (EJ): The fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.

Flood Resilience: The ability of a community or infrastructure to absorb, adapt to, and recover from flood events, minimizing long-term impacts.

Floodplain: Any area of land that can be flooded by water from any source. Floodplains are typically low-lying areas next to rivers, streams, lakes, or other bodies of water.

Hazard Mitigation: Mitigating the impacts of hazards and severe weather through improving natural systems, changing land use patterns, hardening infrastructure, and other interventions. Hazard mitigation overlaps with climate adaptation.

Natural Hazards: Extreme weather events, both short-term shocks and long-term stressors, that can cause damage. Examples of short-term shock events include hurricanes, floods, heat waves, and severe wind. Examples of long-term stressors include drought, rising average temperatures, and ongoing freeze/thaw cycles.

Nature-Based Approaches: Solutions using natural features, like wetlands or vegetation, to manage floodwaters.

1% Annual Chance Floodplain: The floodplain area that has a 1 in 100 probability of being flooded in any given year. Areas subject to the 1% annual chance flood are identified on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMs) and National Flood Hazard Layer available on the FEMA Flood Map Service Center and are referred to as special flood hazard areas. The 1% annual chance flood is often referred to as the “100-year flood,” but this term can be misleading, since floods of this magnitude can occur more frequently than once every 100 years.

Resilience: The ability of an individual or entity to “bounce back” after a severe event. It is how much individuals, institutions, and businesses can survive, adapt, and grow despite the short-term shocks and long-term stressors they may experience.

Risk: Risk is a function of what a hazard could do in a given area, the extent of injury or damage a hazard could cause within that area, and how exposed the people or assets are within that area. For example, severe rains might cause six inches of water flooding an area. All the assets in that area may be vulnerable, but some may be more exposed than others.

Sustainability: To create and maintain the conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony to support present and future generations.

Upstream attenuation: Measures to reduce flood risk by slowing water flow upstream.