Effectively Communicating Flood Risk in Massachusetts

and

A Practical Green Infrastructure Planning Toolkit for Urban Flood Resilience in Everett, MA

April's MassFM Lunch and Learn will feature two presentations on practice-focused research by graduate students from the Tufts Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning program and will be held on Thursday, April 23rd.

Part 1: Effectively Communicating Flood Risk in Massachusetts

Building off of the work completed in the Massachusetts Flood Vulnerability Assessment, this practicum focused on assessing the existing flood risk communication approaches in Lawrence, Chelsea, Springfield, Southbridge, Fall River, Holyoke, Everett, New Bedford, Lynn, and Brockton. These findings were combined with demographic research to draft recommendations that can be implemented within these 10 communities, and across Massachusetts broadly, to improve the effectiveness of flood risk communication.

Part 2: A Practical Green Infrastructure Planning Toolkit for Urban Flood Resilience in Everett, MA

This practicum project develops a green infrastructure (GI) planning toolkit to assist the City of Everett in identifying strategic opportunities to reduce urban flood risk at the parcel and neighborhood scale. By integrating decision-support guidelines and matrices on recommended GI interventions, site-specific concept plans, and an interactive web map, the toolkit comes together to streamline municipal planning and prioritize feasible GI interventions that both enhance flood resilience and support community goals without relying on substantial grant awards.

Speakers

Lexi Lafferty is a second-year master’s student at Tufts University in the Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning program. She focuses on coastal resilience and flood risk communication. She works for Communities Responding to Extreme Weather (CREW) as the Coastal Resilience Coordinator. Through this work, she leads community engagement efforts on the CZM-funded Massachusetts Proactive Coastal Relocation project.

Madison (Maddie) Culcasi is a second-year Environmental Policy and Planning MS student at Tufts University, focusing her studies on water resource management and low-impact development to further climate resilience in Massachusetts. After spending some time exploring the clean energy sector, she now works with MassDEP's Central Regional Office's Drinking Water Program as a water quality Research Fellow and Analyst.