Resilience Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All: Why Local Wisdom and Regional Risk Must Shape the Next Generation of Policy

As the conversation around devolution, resilience, and community-first governance deepens, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: risk is not uniform, and our policy responses shouldn’t be either.

The feedback from the article "The Thread That Ties It All Together" has been rich with insight—from professionals working in state and local government, to private-sector engineers, to those on the front lines of floodplain management. And while their experiences vary, a shared theme has emerged: one-size-fits-all resilience policy not only fails to serve everyone—it can actively undermine efforts to build safer, stronger communities.

Florida: A Case Study in Differentiated Risk Response

After Hurricane Andrew devastated South Florida in 1992, the state responded with high-velocity wind codes. But those codes weren’t applied statewide. Instead, Florida designated specific High Velocity Hurricane Zones (HVHZ) in counties like Broward and Miami-Dade. The result? Better buildings, reduced losses, and enhanced public safety—without overburdening less-risk-prone inland areas.

It’s a model worth studying: a targeted approach where the greatest risks are met with the strongest standards. It shows that states can act boldly without swinging the regulatory hammer indiscriminately.

California: When Resilience Fails as a System of Systems

In contrast, California’s struggle with wildfire resilience highlights what happens when systems fail to work together. You can’t fireproof homes without water in the hydrants. You can’t expect emergency response without fully funded departments and equipment. And you can’t mitigate fire spread without addressing forest undergrowth. Resilience here isn’t just about building codes—it’s about the integration of water, ecology, infrastructure, and governance.

North Carolina: Terrain-Informed Risk Demands New Models

From the coast to the mountains, North Carolina faces a spectrum of hazard profiles. Coastal regions experience high winds and surge; inland, flooding is intensifying; and in the mountains, steep terrain and narrow valleys amplify water impact.

FEMA FIRMs do not adequately reflect these dynamics—especially in western counties. New modeling approaches, like those offered by First Street Foundation and NOAA projections, need to be brought into local planning conversations.

A family story brings this home: when devastating floods hit the mountain valleys of NC, many residents went missing. We were distraught by the news and asked our great-aunt Irene about it. Irene, who had grown up in those mountains, responded matter-of-factly, "They're gone. They’ll never be found." She explained, "We all knew to live near the ridges, not in the valleys. When the gulley washers came through, it took everything within. We tried to tell the newcomers, but they wouldn’t listen."

That’s not folklore. That’s high-resolution, generational wisdom. And it’s more accurate than many flood maps produced from a desk a thousand miles away.

The Moral Hazard of Risk Pooling

Years ago, I remember a conversation about insurance rates in Charleston, SC being subsidized by inland communities like Greenville, SC. In many cases, insurance models—especially within state-regulated property insurance markets—pool risk broadly. This often results in lower-risk inland homeowners indirectly helping to offset the higher costs of insuring coastal properties with elevated risk.

While this pooling strategy may make sense from a short-term business standpoint to keep rates “affordable,” it works counter to the principles of resilience. The true cost and risk of living in high-hazard environments is not fully experienced by the landowner. Instead, those risks and costs are distributed across the system. This masks reality, delays adaptation, and perpetuates decisions that increase long-term vulnerability.

Eventually, insurers will question why they are repeatedly paying to recover properties located in predictable danger zones. The time has come to reduce reliance on broad risk pooling and allow market signals to encourage building in safer, more resilient locations.

Resilience Requires Localized Logic

So, here’s the emerging logic: Resilience must be:

• Regionally targeted based on actual risk,
• Systemically integrated across infrastructure, ecology, and emergency services,
• Historically informed by the communities who live the risk,
• Supported by modern tools like NOAA and First Street for predictive modeling,
• And transparent in cost so that insurance and planning drive real-world adaptation.

States should lead—but they must lead with nuance. A carte blanche policy applied across wildly different geographies may be politically simple but strategically harmful.

And as Bob Prieto wisely pointed out, even when the pendulum needs to swing, we must be cautious about how fast and forcefully we swing it. In systems thinking, "jerk"—the derivative of acceleration—can cause damage when the transition is too sudden. If we move too quickly without building local capacity or coordinating across systems, we risk knocking over the very structures we’re trying to strengthen.

If we want to build resilience that lasts, we need to listen not just to models or mandates, but to the people who know the land, the water, and the storms best.

Next week, we’ll dig deeper into how local governments—and the regional partners who support them—can modernize modeling tools and reclaim risk planning as a locally driven, people-first effort.

If you have a story, a model, or a map that challenges or reinforces this perspective, I’d love to hear from you.

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