We want to provide tools to help communities plan and finish hazard mitigation projects. Success means that 100+ communities finish hazard mitigation projects with the help of our tools. Ideally, communities should be able to use our tools on their own.
We start with calculators that you can use to estimate benefit cost ratios. You can use the benefit cost ratio to decide whether a project is worth doing relative to other projects that you could do instead.
- Will the benefits of this project outweigh its costs?
- Which projects should we do?
By prioritizing projects with the highest benefit cost ratios, you can optimize the allocation of limited resources. Benefit cost ratios are a simple concept that can be extended in many ways:
- Benefits can be preventative. Decreasing the chance of a bad outcome is a benefit.
- Benefits can be probabilistic. A project that limits damage from a hurricane has a greater benefit in places with frequent hurricanes.
- Benefits can have network effects. In an electrical grid, the benefits of undergrounding a power line depends on the line’s location in the network.
Below are some tools you can use to estimate benefit cost ratios.