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The basic question posed to the three panelists was how can society more closely integrate hazard mitigation with environmental planning—or is it even necessary?
All three panelists agreed that there should be a multi-disciplinary team established to propose and evaluate mitigation techniques and environmental planning. That team must weigh both the positive and negative impacts, look at benefit-cost, short-term and long-term issues, and identify and evaluate the tradeoffs, funding, and prioritization. There is no "one correct answer" and each situation (mitigating against a hazard while not harming the environment) must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Basic criteria to do so may be available, but there are no pat answers.
It is important to be careful, in the rush to mitigate against natural hazards, to not make the problem worse. Many attempts to cope with nature have worsened the situation and the environment has been harmed as a trade-off to protect people and property. Too many times the environment has been erred against when a decision has been made to mitigate a natural hazard.
Another issue posed was how to prioritize which hazards to mitigate against when there are limited resources, limited time, competing priorities, and multiple hazards. One panelist felt that in some situations, multi-hazard mitigation might be too costly to "sell." Somehow a decision must be made to mitigate "the best we can with what we have." This may be unfortunate but these decisions are made in the real world where there is not an unlimited supply of resources. Another panelist felt that planning for an extreme event would be prudent, as society would then also be prepared for smaller, more frequent natural hazard events such as floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes.
If the goal is to get people to mitigate or get decision makers to fund projects, then society must do a better job at education. If people are to mitigate, they must first understand the trade-offs. They must be able to comprehend the benefits versus the costs. And, they must understand that these mitigation measures and environmental saving techniques coupled together are not without cost, and in many cases, high costs.
The panelists considered the need to develop a "soft engineering" discipline which simultaneously considers hazard mitigation in the context of environmental planning. They again stressed the need to include engineers and scientists together (multi-disciplinary) to more closely integrate hazard mitigation into the broader context of environmental planning.
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Index of 1998 Session Summaries