Recently, IRIS researchers Yee Huang and Matt Shudtz developed the Legal, Regulatory and Policy Primer on Levee Setbacks, a tool intended to help interested communities strategize how to implement a levee setback by helping planning branches in federal agencies, local levee districts and beyond understand the authorities, funding programs, permitting and legal requirements, and incentives and obstacles to implementing a levee setback.
Across the United States, levees have fundamentally altered the landscape of river basins and the communities within them. Repeated and catastrophic levee failures, evolving public values, and increasing frequency of extreme weather events have driven the search for better ways to manage flood risk, to repair flood-damaged levees, and to meet environmental and ecosystem needs.
A levee setback addresses these goals by realigning an existing levee or constructing a new levee that is located away from the active river channel. Increasing the distance between the levee and the river channel allows the river to reconnect to its historic floodplain, which provides myriad ecosystem services: flood mitigation and flood hazard reduction, water filtration, groundwater recharge, habitat, and recreational opportunities. The floodplain adds a dynamic, green component of flood management to the static, gray infrastructure that is the levee. Together this hybrid green-gray infrastructure reduces flood risk and preserves environmental benefits and values.