rachelbeery / flatiron-capstone

Flatiron-Capstone

Project Overview

This project uses regression analysis to study the features of most importance in hazard mitigation success. To reduce community damage, money, and resources spent we can increase our ROI through correct allocation of hazard mitigation funds.

Notebook & Dataset

Refer to the Capstone_Hazard_Mitigation_Positive_ROI notebook as a guide for Hazard Mitigation and Recovery Analysis.

The Opendataset can be downloaded at the following link: https://www.fema.gov/openfema-data-page/hazard-mitigation-assistance-projects-v2

Final Findings

• Program Areas

  • More funds should be allocated to hazard mitigation in all categories of hazard mitigation with the HMGP being the most common program

• Regions

  • Certain areas of the US are more prone to natural disasters and need more funding for hazard mitigation including 1, 2, 4, and 9 having the best ROI
  • Regions 6 & 7 having the lowest ROI

• Less common Natural Disaster Preparedness

  • The costs of COVID-19 surpass all categories of natural disaster recovery costs - Preparations could have been made to offset the extreme costs of COVID-19

Project Amount

For modeling purposes, extreme outliers were removed and project amount was limited to $500,000. In the following visual we can see that project amounts in hazard mitigation are heavily right skewed.

Program Areas of most importance in Hazard Mitigation

The following visual is a boxplot combination with a swarmplot that shows the quantity of each project area along with the costs to understand the spread of costs for each area.

In the visual below it is evident that even with varying cost of projects in each program area there is equal spread of benefit cost ratio.

Regions of most importance in Hazard Mitigation

Better region planning would benefit hazard mitigation to reduce recovery costs. The regions with the largest recovery cost include 1, 2, 4, and 9. These regions are included in are all coastal areas with increased amount of natural disasters.

Regions 6 & 7 have the lowest ROI

Hazard Mitigation Costs over time

In 2016 there was a spike in hazard mitigation costs and again occured in 2020 and will inevitably increase in the next year because of the costs of COVID-19.

Due to this increase in costs from COVID-19 there will be a extreme decrease in the benefit cost ratio because hazard mitigation will not see a ROI until years to come.

The Data

The dataset used is an OpenFEMA Dataset for Hazard Mitigation Analysis and can be found at the following source: https://www.fema.gov/openfema-data-page/hazard-mitigation-assistance-projects-v2