South Carolina Resilience Planning Archive
Project Background
Natural hazards present serious and evolving threats across South Carolina, including stormwater flooding, tidal flooding, hurricanes, earthquakes, and fires, many of which can be exacerbated by human activities like pollution and development of vulnerable areas. Hazard resilience is an important part of prudent planning efforts by state, county, and municipal governments, as well as non-governmental organizations, private entities, and individuals. The worsening effects of climate change, including coastal communities losing land to sea-level rise and erosion, demand special consideration to mitigate risk under uncertain future environmental conditions. Resilience planning decisions can have major environmental justice impacts, in part because many hazards disproportionately harm marginalized communities with very limited resources.
The South Carolina Resilience Planning Archive is a research tool on the S.C. Sea Grant Consortium website that was launched in 2022 and provides easy access to more than 400 recent resilience planning documents from across the state. While certain plans focus on resilience, such as FEMA-required hazard mitigation plans, many other types of plans incorporate elements of resilience planning. For example, South Carolina’s 2020 Disaster Relief and Resilience Act amended the state’s Comprehensive Planning Enabling Act to require local planners to include a resilience element in their comprehensive plans, which must be updated every 10 years and evaluated every five years.
Project Goals
The archive is the first central hub for South Carolina’s resilience plans, and it resolves the difficulty facing researchers and planners who previously had to search for hundreds of plans individually. The archive is being utilized by the S.C. Office of Resilience (SCOR) in the ongoing development of the first Strategic Statewide Resilience and Risk Reduction Plan. SCOR was created under the S.C. Resilience Revolving Fund Act of 2020.
The archive is also being utilized by local planners to identify best practices in developing the newly required resilience element of their upcoming comprehensive plans. The archive includes searchable data fields, a detailed glossary, and a form that planners have been utilizing to submit new plans to be uploaded.
Stakeholder Engagement
In developing the archive, the Consortium engaged with key stakeholders in local and state government, including SCOR and the S.C. Department of Natural Resources’ Climatology Office, as well as experts in academia and the nonprofit sector.
Consortium staff have also presented the archive and gathered feedback from researchers and planners at our first statewide Research Symposium in May of 2022, the S.C. Climate Connections Workshop Series, and the S.C. Coastal Information Network. In addition, Consortium staff were interviewed by the Associated Press and to spread public awareness of the archive.