Purpose: – The Federal Emergency Management Agency provides guidelines for the management of open space created through property acquisition (buyouts); however, land use decisions are primarily left to local governments manifesting in a variety of uses. The purpose of this paper is to provide a land use assessment of buyout sites, to describe the changes in those uses that have occurred during a ten-year period from 1990 to 2000, and to offer an assessment of management approaches employed across these sites.Design/methodology/approach: – Using a mixed-methods approach consisting of a land use classification survey and a semi-structured questionnaire of floodplain managers, this study explores the land use trends at buyout sites, diverse approaches local governments take in managing the open spaces created through floodplain buyout programs, and the successes and challenges communities face in open space management.Findings: – Results indicate strong support from floodplain managers for property acquisition and several cases emerged where communities put their newly acquired public land to creative uses. However, the opportunity to leverage these properties for greater public values is largely being missed, primarily because of limited funding.Practical implications: – The analysis indicates strong support among floodplain managers for the buyout approach; however, additional resource-sharing and funding opportunities are needed to increase the utility of buyout properties.Originality/value: – By evaluating the long-term management strategies floodplain managers utilize on buyout sites, this study adds to an underrepresented area of scholarship and is of value to practitioners, government officials, and academics.

With the onset of climate change resulting in more frequent hazard events and coastal inundation, communities are considering buyouts as a tool for climate adaptation. Despite a growing body of research, there has never been a systematic review of the literature on buyout programs, although our ability to implement buyouts successfully relies on a thorough understanding of buyout policy, design, implementation, and impacts. In this systematic literature review of voluntary buyouts in the United States, we distill key learnings, identify remaining gaps, present avenues for future research, and make policy recommendations. We find that the buyout literature is nascent, but coalesces around the topics of buyout experience, buyout practice and implementation, housing policy, flood reduction, and justice and equity. Recommendations for future research include an increased emphasis on theory, the contexts in which buyouts occur, longitudinal studies, and more explicit recognition of researcher and disciplinary bias.

The postdisaster landscape is replete with memorials that help communities collectively remember destructive events and recover psychologically. Although commemoration is intrinsic to all stages of...

Student participation in municipal disaster drills can enhance geographic skill sets as well as build community resilience to local hazards. In these drills, students often assume the role of victims to help test local emergency response services. Teaching in an interdisciplinary department, we incorporate these field-based learning opportunities into undergraduate courses that draw heavily on geographic concepts yet reside outside of traditional geographic departments. Given that students enrolled in these courses possess varied backgrounds in geography, we incorporate basic geographic literacy into our course designs and found that municipal disaster drills serve as an impactful field-based learning experience. Though pedagogical observations of students’ understanding of geographic concepts prior to, during, and following disaster drills, we critically examine how this experiential learning activity can enhance students’ understanding of human–environment interaction, political geography, and cultural geography.