Centering Racial Justice in Urban Flood Resilience Policy and Planning: Tools for Practitioners

Racial and spatial segregation in cities generate uneven exposure to current and future urban flood risks and worsen the economic and health consequences of flooding for Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities. In this article, we present a tool for practitioners to center racial justice in urban flood resilience policy and planning. This tool includes and operationalizes five principles for centering racial justice to produce policies and plans that drive transformative urban resilience. The five principles are: (1) focus on root causes; (2) institutionalize representation; (3) co-own planning efforts with communities; (4) center equity in data collection and analysis; and (5) facilitate cross-sector collaboration. Along with these principles, we have developed an open-source resource hub with case studies, decision-making supports, and policy briefs that can help practitioners put the principles into practice in partnership with community. We acknowledge that this work is incremental, and to fully operationalize these principles, more work needs to be done to dismantle current systems and rebuild them in a racially equitable way. Future work, we argue, should especially focus on developing robust project and policy evaluation methods that similarly center racial justice.