The Current — and Future — State of Hazard Mitigation Planning with Chrissy Caggiano, AICP

Welcome to the 2026 Trend Talk podcast, a multipart miniseries from the American Planning Association in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. This series focuses on new and emerging trends and their potential impacts on our communities and the practice of planning. My name is Joe DeAngelis, research manager at the American Planning Association, and your host. Today, I'm joined by the new chair of APA's Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Division, Chrissy Caggiano, for what is going to likely be a wide-ranging discussion on the tumultuous present and the uncertain future of hazard mitigation planning in the United States.

Chrissy is currently technical manager for planning at Michael Baker International, where she has been involved in hazard mitigation planning efforts at all levels of government across her 15 years, from helping communities build their local mitigation strategies to conducting statewide risk assessments to supporting FEMA's planning, flood mapping, and grants programs. Chrissy is passionate about building resilient communities through planning, risk communication, storytelling, and education. A proud Philadelphian (go birds!), Chrissy holds a BA in geography from the George Washington University and a master of city planning degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

 Chrissy, how are you doing today?

Happy to be here, Joe. It's good to see you.

You as well. I think that this is going to be a fun discussion. There's a lot happening in the mitigation planning field today. This includes the typical stuff, the storms and floods and fires that are pretty much getting worse than they've been before. But there's also this ongoing major rethinking of the federal role in mitigation planning that stands to have some substantial impacts on local practitioners. But I think it might be good if we set a baseline for where we're at today a bit.

Let's start by talking about the planner's role in the hazard mitigation space. The recent trend that we've been observing has been toward increasing involvement of local community planners and hazard mitigation. This is a field that historically emergency managers tended to play a larger role. The increasing involvement of planners, though, from our perspective, is maybe born somewhat out of necessity. Climate change, the increasing frequency and severity of storms, floods, wildfire, all those fun things, but also out of a very conscious understanding that land use has a huge impact on hazard risks and outcomes.

From your own perspective, can you give me your sense of the role of the planner in this field, this hazards planning, hazard mitigation field today?

Sure. I think your assessment of the historic trend is straight on. So early in my career, mitigation planning was very dominated by emergency managers. We would go in to kick off meetings as consultants and say, "Hey, you might want to put your planning commission on the team," and they didn't really know. And I think, frankly, that leap is not that odd knowing, okay, the requirements for the mitigation plan come from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, so therefore, I, as the emergency manager, am responsible for this.

But I would say over my 15 years of both writing and reviewing mitigation plans nationwide, one of the trends that we tended to see is that the plans are stronger, they're more comprehensive, and they're more actionable when it comes to moving from a plan to actual risk reduction progress when you've got a planner either in the driver's seat or in the front seat navigating the process. And so when I think about the role of the mitigation planner today, it really comes down to the fact that in the long term, when we're talking about mitigation, we're talking about sustained risk reduction. We're not talking about putting up sandbags. We're talking about elevating structures so that they're out of harm's way.

Sustained risk reduction often comes down in a really long-term sense to two things: where and how we build. Those are central tenets and values of us as planners. When I talk about where we build, that's zoning, land use, your overlay districts. Like, literally, where are we growing and where are we putting people and structures and infrastructure? Because the safest community is the one that you don't put in harm's way to begin with. And then the how part is a little bit more tangential to us in the traditional sense, but it is inarguable that planners have a role in building codes, permitting inspections, and how we implement the rules of how we build our communities. And then beyond that where and how, the role of the planner is often tied to building buy-in partnerships and championing risk reduction. Community engagement and community-oriented solutioning is central to the planners' wheelhouse. And in my experience, if we aren't meeting people where they are and working within those skills and constraints, we're not going to get to implementation.

Absolutely. Yeah, that's a good overview and a highly comprehensive look at where things are. It's been a field that from our perception here has actually changed a lot in the last 10, 15, 20 years, and I think it's likely to change quite a bit going into the future. Still setting that baseline, though, I think it might be good for us to look a bit at the state of practice today.

There seems to be a broad movement right now to transition much of the responsibility for things like funding and supporting hazard mitigation away from the federal government and toward the states. But with two fairly different strategies, I would say, for getting there. One strategy we've identified as part of a longer-term, rigorous process of devolution. This has been in the air for a while. It's not necessarily a new movement or a new idea, seeing what states do best, seeing what the federal government does best, and then maybe redefining that relationship a bit and the roles of each of the partners here. The other approach has been to cast doubt on federal capacity and responsibilities broadly, and even things like FEMA's existence, the administration at times calling for the outright abolition of the agency.

Can you talk a bit about this movement broadly to deemphasize the federal role in hazard mitigation and maybe the different strategies toward transitioning towards mitigation-specific responsibilities for state governments and local communities?

Yeah. Well, I think the first framing thought here is if you ask folks working in this space, all disasters are inherently local. So it makes sense that this idea of devolution and what does the role of every level of government look like has long been a conversation in the hazard mitigation and disaster recovery community, that the over-reliance somewhat on the federal bailout after a disaster doesn't really incentivize state and community ownership and understanding of their risk.

As human beings, in our lizard brains, if you know somebody else is going to foot the bill for you every single time, you're probably not going to make the investment. There's a whole lot more behavioral science behind those kinds of decision-making if you want to get into it. But in my view, what it comes down to is that having skin in the game matters, and co-creating solutions matters. And in fact, what we saw at the end of the second Obama administration is that FEMA started exploring what they called a disaster deductible that factored in how every state and territory ran their emergency management system. So if you spent more money, you had more insurance policies, you spent more money on mitigation proactively, you would get more money in the event of a disaster. If you didn't make those kinds of investments, your deductible for federal support would be higher. 

When we think about policies like that, those are the kinds of things that put a real incentive to see mitigation and preparedness gains. But unfortunately, the clock ran out really before that became policy. I actually personally would love to see a thoughtful devolution of responsibilities that takes that state, local, tribal, territorial capability into account and rightsizes support. But I think the key there is really that there is a thoughtful and a planful approach, and that is not what we're seeing.

So a thoughtful shift in responsibilities, when we think about how we move for communities from being aware that they have a risk to acting, we typically, in a behavioral model, talk about three interim steps. One is belief that my risk is real. Two is value that mitigation is worth the investment. And third is that I have the ability and the capability to get it done. And so if you're going to have that thoughtful shift, you need to have the upfront investment in the capability and capacity of state, local, tribal, and territorial governments to get them ready to take over. And that kind of a system has to recognize that it's not going to be all or nothing because we have this incredibly rich, wonderful tapestry of American communities and what they need.

And so instead, what we've really seen is this ripping off of the Band-Aid with little or no preparation that has been leaving communities, especially those in immediate recovery, in the lurch for costs that sometimes exceed their entire municipal budgets. And in some cases, like the cancellation of grant programs or the implicit cancellation with not putting out notice as a funding opportunity, the opportunities that existed that specifically supported mitigation, implementation, and capability building, whether it was flood mapping program or grants like the Hazard Mitigation Grant program, the Building Infrastructure and Communities program, those are gone.

My analogy here is that if we are asking the states to cater dinner for us, we can't expect them to do it without either one, paying for it, or two, dropping off the ingredients in the recipe for what we want them to make. It's just not going to happen if we haven't made the investment. It's unrealistic to expect that state governments can take over this wholly without some kind of a transition period, and that transition period has effectively not happened.

That's a really interesting transition to what I'd like to talk about next, which is the planners' role within this changing framework of stuff, if we can call it a framework, then this changing framework of stuff. We're looking at these issues for our trend report, for our foresight work over the next 10, 20, 30 years. It's difficult to extrapolate things out when there's this weird period that we're going through right now of rapid change. But let's try to do that a little bit. Let's look ahead into the next 10, 20 years or so and how the planner's role might be changing here.

Let's say that there is a devolution of responsibilities in hazard mitigation broadly from the federal government to state governments. What does that actually look like for your typical planner who's engaged in this and will be engaged in this work? How might their work and the responsibilities of local government change? We were talking earlier that disasters aren't going to stop. The need for developing mitigation plans aren't going to stop. But the entire framework for that might be very different. So what does it look like for a planner operating in that framework in the future?

I wish I had a crystal ball for this one. I would say that my hope is that the role of the planner would actually be elevated across the board because of, as I said at the beginning, those founding values that we have. Planners tend to be systems-oriented and ready to act as translators and conveners. And so I would hope that it means also seeing the value of planners integrated into emergency management functions nationwide, because at this point, every state has some emergency management or Homeland Security function, but not every state has a statewide planning function. In fact, very few do. And APA has got great research on what that landscape of state planning regulations and frameworks looks like. But I think it'll mean for planners a lot more getting into the weeds for what my community needs, wants, and values, stretching even more into the boundaries of getting close to architecture and engineering work. So we are not ever going to be the people that are building, but I do think that it requires us having a really strong stake in place at the table to build those consensus-based and community systems.

The other thing that I think you're going to end up seeing is if there are fewer federal requirements around mitigation planning, if it is not about eligibility for grants, I think the planner's role actually gets more important because then it is not a checking-the-box activity. It is a deliberate process to understand and build a very specific strategy for the risks my community faces. So it's not going to be about meeting element B1 and explaining the number and type of hazards in a planning area that might be a county or six counties. I would love to see the trend go in the direction of more local role and fewer mitigation plans and more mitigation planning, more of that consistent act towards planning for a resilient and climate-adaptable future and less meeting a set of requirements. And that is going to mean more of that consensus building, really understanding what are my community's values? What is our capacity? And when will we need help?

That's really interesting because to me, it seems like a development of stuff that is already happening even within this frame. Because I like what you said about maybe less mitigation plans, but more mitigation planning. We've seen over the years a lot more integration of climate and hazards information directly into comp plans as they exist or the development of standalone adaptation plans that are already, that are integrated with comp plans and things like that. I think that that's already getting to that. It'll be interesting to see potentially how that might develop over time.

One follow-up I want to get at here a bit, though, is that, and you touched on this a little bit, but the experience of that in the future might really depend on the state itself a lot. Because some states have a lot more expertise and capacity, and they might have more money, or this might be a higher priority for them than other states. But there's also the wild card of the volume and the scale of the disasters themselves. I'm thinking of a state like California, maybe, in this context, where they're facing the full gamut of things that most nations are facing in that way, and that being very much a higher priority, and that planners have the potential, maybe, to be more supported in that type of an environment where this is a priority, partially out of necessity. Whereas in other states, it might be a somewhat different type of experience.

This also intersects a bit with the future reliability of the federal government as a partner, because I think some of it comes down to the states can maybe take on a lot more of a guiding regulatory role here, but sometimes the money is also going to have to come from somewhere, and states have other financial priorities, and things are already challenging in that area. It's going to be a really complex type of a situation. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that.

Yeah. I think, as you said, there are states that have really been excelling in the hazard mitigation space for decades. And those states look really different. Yes, it is California, but it's also Iowa, and it's Florida, and it's Massachusetts, when it comes, and they all tackle it from a slightly different perspective, and they are, frankly, very different scales of states. You don't think of Iowa as really being a stronghold here, but they've been an enhanced, they have been what's called an enhanced state, meaning that they've demonstrated additional capabilities beyond the minimum for mitigation planning and mitigation implementation. It's one of those ones where Iowa, if you read their plan, you probably don't sit there and think, "Yeah, man, they're enhanced. They're really doing it." But when you actually look at their programs on the ground, they very much are. At the other end, you've got states that are really just getting their sea legs because as the number and type of disasters is expanding, yes, you're seeing more volume in the states that are already doing it, but you're also seeing more events in places that, frankly, are just not equipped and have never had to deal with them before.

Frankly, when it comes down to it government efficiency, which is our stated goal here, an efficient government is a consistent government that is reliable, that has clear ways of working. Even now, we see how much state turnover impacts mitigation projects. Mitigation projects take a lot of political will, a lot of political will. And that, I think, and savvy thinking about how do we meet multiple bottom lines, that I think is a space that planners can play in a lot here in that coalition building, and how do we bring people together, and how do we elevate the importance of this. We see all the time that when the person who is willing to spend the political capital and have the savvy thinking leaves, the ability to mitigate does, too. We've had instances where one person leaves, and we're like, "Is the state still enhanced?" That's a question that we've had. It depends so much on the state's capabilities, capacity, prior experience.

But there are also avenues, even now, for states to take more ownership of their mitigation futures. The big one that FEMA offers is called Program Administration by States, where, again, states demonstrate that they are capable of taking on — you can be PAS in two areas. One is around the delegation of plan approval, and the second is around the delegation of grants management. So there are already pathways for states now to learn what that might look like. If you start now in a small way in a program that already exists, that continues to position you in the future. It's not going to fix all the problems, but it does provide an on-ramp to the future that we are probably going to see more and more of.

I want to come back to this topic I discussed earlier of uncertainty. I mean, it's such a word now. We're constantly hearing it all over the place, but that is what a lot of our foresight work and our trend report work here at APA is all about.

With all this happening in the background, again, disasters haven't necessarily stopped. They're unlikely to stop. They're likely to get worse. Can you give me a sense of the mood among planners who are maybe working in this space, how they're coping within this environment of uncertainty, even as they're going to have to continue to do this work?

If you look at the Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Division's memberships, we span all levels of government, state, local, regional entities, private sector, federal government. And so there are many of us who are in very, very different situations. I saw a T-shirt the other day, I was walking around Philadelphia, and a vendor had a shirt that said, "It is what it is, and it ain't great." I think that is where a lot of us are right now because the whiplash and the change has been so rapid and there hasn't been... We haven't had the time to take the step back and recalibrate what actually can this mean for us.

I think that there are a lot of us are in that that, "Oh, god, what do we do?" mindset, because mitigation has been a bipartisan issue since the passage of the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000. The institutions and the framework has been fundamentally different in the last nine months, and I think we're all struggling to catch up. In the first Trump administration, we saw the Disaster Recovery Reform Act, signed by this President, showing that mitigation is an essential function for U.S. investments in bringing the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program. I think many of us were like, "Okay, it's going to be different, but this is still something that we value. This is still something that Congress values. This is still something that has money behind it. It is required by law." I think the fact that I think some of us are still feeling this sensation of having the rug pulled out from underneath us, struggling to catch up.

I will say, though, as you move from the federal level down to the local level, I think in some spaces there's also this sense of like, "Well, we still got to do it and we still know how to do it, so we're just going to dig in. We're going to double down on this being important in our communities and for our own long-term well-being." But I think the central question we often get to is, where's the money going to come from? Because when you have competing priorities and the sky is blue, mitigation tends to fall lower on that list of priorities in communities, which is why the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program was so important for so many years.

You don't think about mitigation until the event happens. The whole intent of HMGP was to scoop out a chunk of that post-disaster funding and say, yeah, we're going to do it better for next time, and not having that — there hasn't been any HMGP authorized, I believe, since February — that's a pretty big change because the other thing is that HMGP in a lot of places funded mitigation plans for local communities, and so you're asking them to do it by themselves. I think that the mood is, I think we're moving from the shocked period to the, "Okay, no, we still know this is important. This is key to who we are." And now it's moving into the little bit of hope, of like, "All right, we've got this. How can we do it again in the future?"

You're really good at transitioning us to what I think would be next on the list here. This is maybe the final question and discussion topic for us today. We know that this is difficult work. It's not going to get better over the coming years, even if you're just looking at how disasters are taking place in the scale and frequency and severity and those types of things. But a bit of a silver-lining trend that we've been tracking, and we've got to it a bit in this discussion today, has been this gradual integration of hazard mitigation and climate change adaptation into what we see as the typical scope of local planning in the same way that things like transportation planning or zoning and things like that are a part of it.

Now, these are all inextricably linked. We're talking about land use, and we say that land use is directly linked with hazard mitigation planning. So these are important things. This is partially due, again, to the necessity of having to deal with more frequent and severe natural disasters. Planners are just thinking about it more because they're exposed to it a whole lot more. But there is a lot more awareness these days of the role of land use, and by extension, the role of planning in this discussion. We do think that's probably a really good thing for communities, especially now when they might be seeing a whole lot more responsibility foisted onto them. As shifting to a bit of a more optimistic frame, as you're looking into the near future, 10, 20 years down the line, what do you see as some potentially optimistic trends in this area or even just bare signals related to local mitigation planning?

I think it's definitely a good thing for communities. We've also been seeing in the field this movement towards hazards are one lever or function that we layer in with all of our other growth and development decisions. My dream scenario is that we actually aren't talking about hazard mitigation planning, we're just talking about how we have safe and sustainable communities. It's not a separate process.

I alluded to this, but if there are fewer or no FEMA requirements, might those plans be more community action-oriented? I think one of the concerns we see in mitigation plans is the scale of a county or a region. You can't... Mitigation is local. These decisions are sometimes block by block, structure by structure. You're never going to get to that if you're only talking about it every five years in a federally mandated planning framework.

I think I would see... I am optimistic about more community-oriented and almost more micro-level planning that's assigned or aligned to a specific problem or pain point that the community can rally around. So this idea that we're probably not going to be able to fix everything at the same time, but how can we chunk the mitigation or resilience puzzle, right? Because I had one of my mentors, my previous manager at Michael Baker, used to talk about mitigation as a patchwork quilt, and that you can add patches to the quilt, and that will add levels of protection over time. So systems-wide solutions are necessary, but they can and should be complemented by site-scale activities that can then aggregate. You still want it to be as a part of a larger framework, right? We don't build houses without a set of blueprints. The planning is the blueprint, and that is still really important. 

I also think that there are some really interesting reform bills on the table that could harness what planners' role looks like. The big one is the FEMA Act of 2025, which has been passed out of committee. That really looks at how can we stack federal resources to more efficiently deliver. Why do I have to go to HUD for this chunk and FEMA for this chunk? I got to worry like, nobody can actually fix my house. They can just give me temporary housing. Some of the reforms and the idea in the FEMA Act of there will be a hit list of projects that communities and counties are already putting out and saying, we know we need to fix this when we're ready to get there.

Then I think the inherent nature of planners is that we want to help. We know as a field that we have the skills to tackle the problems. We know we have the ability to bring the right people to the table. As an industry, I think we're ready sitting here saying, "Put us in, coach." The fact that mitigation is no longer just — when I started, it was a very niche thing. I had to be taught mitigation planning, soup to nuts, by my colleagues at Michael Baker. Now, when I interview people for jobs or when we have interns or when I speak to groups at planning schools, they're coming to us with more of a base of knowledge that this is a layer they need to be thinking about. Whereas, when I started, I had to explain what the National Flood Insurance Program was to my classmates because it was just not something they thought about.

So there is bringing it into the ubiquity of the planning conversation and what it means for communities. And sometimes that means not calling it mitigation because people don't understand what that means. But if you said, "Hey, it always floods at Front and Main. Should we maybe think about doing something so that there's not water in your basements all the time?" That's an easier prospect for communities to link on to. So I think we're going to see the planner's role in a much more specific and micro level.

That's fantastic. I really appreciate that perspective in things, especially the stuff about the need to be educated on this topic is not nearly... You don't need that beginning to end, hey, this is what hazard mitigation planning is, as you might have in the past. In planning schools, it's much more common for these topics to be addressed, either through the lens of climate change adaptation or hazard mitigation or whatever it might be. Then there's a lot more on the job needs for planners to be informed about it, to know about hazard mitigation planning, even if, as you say, we're not actually calling it that in the context. But if you're doing a zoning or a revision of your zoning map, at some point in one of those meetings, there's a decent chance that, hey, what is the flood likelihood within these areas? And how might that reflect on what we'd like to rezone this area to be? So I think that it's all important stuff that's gradually infiltrating, I would say, the profession in a positive way, likely to continue into the future for sure.

With that, I think we can wrap it up for today. Thank you, Chrissy, for joining us for this fantastic conversation. We really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me. And if this conversation intrigued you, please reach out to the Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. One of our big reasons for existing is networking and education for people to understand what the state of the field is and what mitigation means for the planning community at large. So we are happy to participate today.

Awesome. Thanks, Chrissy.

For more on this topic, a summary of this discussion and many, many other collected trends and signals, please check out APA's 2026 Trend Report, which is available at planning.org/foresight.