Quantifying the relationship between predisaster mitigation spending and major disaster declarations for US states and territories.

Since the Stafford Act of 1988, the process of obtaining a formal Major Disaster Declaration has been codified for national implementation, with tasks defined at the smallest levels of local government up to the President. The Disas-ter Mitigation Act of 2000 (DMA 2000) placed additional requirements on local government to plan for mitigation ac-tivities within their jurisdictions. The goal of DMA 2000 was to not only implement more mitigative actions at the local level, but also initiate a process by which local governments could set up ongoing conversations and collaborative efforts with neighboring jurisdictions to ensure continuous, proactive measures were taken against the impacts of disasters. Based on the increased attention paid to mitigation and planning activities, a reasonable expectation would be to see a decline in the number of major disaster declarations since DMA 2000. However, simple correlation analy-sis shows that since DMA 2000, the number of major disaster declarations continues to increase. This article is in-tended as a preliminary study to encourage more detailed analysis in the future of the impacts of federal policy on local-level disaster prevention.

Comparing predisaster mitigation grant spending with postdisaster assistance spending: Are mitigation investments saving federal dollars?

This work is a companion paper to "Quantifying the Relationship Between Predisaster Mitigation Spending and Major Disaster Declarations for US States and Territories." Mitigation is a relatively new undertaking, especially for local jurisdictions, within the United States disaster policy. The Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 (DMA 2000) requires local jurisdictions to plan for and implement mitigative strategies in order to access federal grant funding options for emergency management. After DMA 2000 went into effect in the mid-2000s, a supporting study by the Multi-Hazard Mitigation Council (MMC 2005) found that on average, mitigation projects yielded a benefit-cost ratio of 4:1 at the local level.1 This paper evaluates and compares predisaster mitigation spending and postdisaster assistance spend-ing at the state and FEMA Regional levels, hypothesizing that as mitigation spending increases, postdisaster spend-ing should decrease. The results however indicate the opposite, with most states showing increasing in both types of spending over time.