James Schwab
Jim Schwab is the manager of the American Planning Association’s (APA’s) Hazards Planning Research Center, a senior research associate, and co-editor of a monthly publication, Zoning Practice.
In the past 15 years, Schwab has increasingly carved out a niche as an expert on natural hazards and disaster recovery. He served as the primary author and principal investigator for Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Redevelopment (PAS Report No. 483/484, 1998), which APA produced under a cooperative agreement with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). He has authored two other Planning Advisory Service (PAS) Reports, Industrial Performance Standards for a New Century (No. 444, 1993) and Planning and Zoning for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (No. 482, 1998). He was project manager for a FEMA-supported project in which APA developed training for planners on the planning provisions of the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000, as well as the Firewise Communities Post-Workshop Assessment, which gauged the impact of the National Fire Protection Association’s Firewise workshops on community behavior. He managed a project funded by the National Fire Protection Association that has resulted in a new PAS Report, Planning for Wildfires (No. 529/530, 2005), co-authored with Stuart Meck.
More recently, Schwab was the principal investigator and primary author of Tribal Transportation Programs, a 2007 report produced for the Transportation Research Board. He was the project manager and general editor for a new PAS Report, Planning the Urban Forest: Ecology, Economy, and Community Development, released in January 2009. In addition, he has worked on hazards and disaster recovery issues in the Dominican Republic and Sri Lanka, spoken in Taiwan, and was a visiting fellow in 2008 for the Centre for Advanced Engineering in New Zealand.