Planning for climate and disasters

Planning is key

Climate and emergency management planning help us …

Understand potential risks
Adopt sensitive measures to address those risks
Set priorities
Improve responses when our cultural resources are impacted

Historic preservation needs to be integrated into municipal, county and state plans. The periods during and after a disaster are crucial and do not allow time for deliberation. Effective planning gives responders and agencies a strategy for approaching historic resources. Beyond individual disasters, resilience strategies protect these historic resources from long-term threats.

State planning

HPO participates in a variety of climate change and disaster planning initiatives. These help us understand how natural and human-caused hazards impact historic resources. Our office also ensures these broader strategic plans consider historic resources.

DEP’s Strategic Climate Action Plan

These reports complement the statewide Climate Change Resilience Strategy. They examine the effectiveness of the existing statewide recommendations and recommend further ways to develop this strategy.

NJ Hazard Mitigation Plan

This plan outlines a strategy to reduce risks from hazards and serves as the basis for prioritizing future project funding.

NJ Historic Preservation Plan

The NJ Historic Preservation Plan includes a new statewide goal for climate and disaster planning. Learn about the planning process and how Goal 4 outlines strategies to increase integration of historic preservation into disaster planning and resilience.

Local planning

Historic resources need protection in community-level climate change and disaster planning. This involves identifying local resources and their unique needs and threats. Incomplete, outdated and/or inaccurate historic resource inventory data hinders local planning. Our office assists communities throughout the state in developing stronger local inventories.

Municipal Master Plans

Communities can develop or update local master plan Historic Preservation Elements to include climate and disaster considerations for historic resources.

Survey and Inventory

Learn how to develop accurate and updated historic resource inventories that support climate and disaster planning and decision making.