Mind the Gaps: Identifying Needed Hazards-Planning Skills

The impacts of climate change are not relegated to one region or country, and borders are of no concern to a natural disaster. As hazards become more universally common, planners everywhere should be informed of how to address them. This starts with an understanding of what planners know and do not, what they are and are not able to do. Throughout 2024, APA worked with a diverse group of experts from the public and private sectors to understand planners’ current gaps in both knowledge and skills as they pertain to hazard mitigation and climate adaptation efforts. At NPC ‘25, a number of these experts spoke primarily on the knowledge gaps that were identified; this year, the focus will be on skills gaps.

A panel of practitioners will discuss the abilities they see as being vital to know in order to advance hazard mitigation and climate adaptation efforts, but ones which are largely not held by planners currently. Session attendees will come away with an understanding of issues relevant to these fields that planners stand to improve awareness of, the ability to identify skills that planners can gain to improve their resilience efforts, and knowledge about how practitioners from a variety of disciplines helped to inform these findings.