A comparison of plan integration for flood and heat resilience: A case study of Baltimore, Maryland

Due to the deadly and costly impacts of flooding, extreme heat, and limited resources for resilience-building efforts, cities need win-win strategies that address multiple hazards. Despite widespread calls for all-hazards planning approaches, significant knowledge gaps remain, particularly regarding interdependencies between environmental phenomena and urban systems. Current strategies often focus on single-hazard solutions, which may not be effective against the multifaceted impacts of climate change. The goal of this study is to propose a planning framework for considering synergies and trade-offs in flood and heat resilience planning and to pilot an approach for applying that conceptual framework to evaluate a community's network of plans. We apply this flood-heat resilience planning framework to evaluate how policies in four of Baltimore, Maryland's key city plans would affect flood and heat risks. We find a minority of policies are relevant to both hazards, and those that do generally apply citywide and target green networks, vacant structures, urban agriculture, neighborhood centers, and public open spaces. Many of these policies are synergistic ‘flood-heat co-benefit’ policies like green infrastructure. We identify fewer ‘flood-heat trade-off’ policies that would enhance resilience to one hazard while increasing risks for the other. While theoretically, ‘flood-heat maladaptation’ policies reducing resilience to both hazards are possible, we do not find these in the plans, although many policies with unclear heat impacts could be implemented in maladaptive ways. The study highlights these gaps and opportunities and underscores the importance of integrating multihazard evaluations into holistic urban resilience planning processes.