Abstract
Communities in the United States are increasingly undertaking initiatives aimed to prepare themselves for the impacts of climate change, improve their resilience, and build their sustainability. To achieve these objectives, communities often undertake a planning process resulting in various planning documents - namely, sustainability, climate change adaptation, hazard mitigation, and resilience plans. These documents are integral to communities as they create plans and objectives that help them achieve goals related to climate change, environmental sustainability, and economic development, among other topics. As communities undertake initiatives to simultaneously address these objectives, it is important to understand how the planning processes used may be similar and potentially complementary, or may be distinct and present trade-offs to one another, and to anticipate how this may affect community planning. To explore this issue, as part of the Professional Research Experience Program (PREP) working with researchers at The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Community Resilience Group, we conducted a content analysis of community resilience, climate change adaptation, hazard mitigation, and sustainability planning guides at the community scale. Through identifying the commonalities and differences of these documents, our research aims to improve planning efficiency, foster communication on these topics, and benefit communities.