Projects
Chickasaw Nation Community Climate Vulnerability Assessment
Location:
Ada, OK
Expertise:
Environment
Services:
Natural Resources, Sustainability, Water Resources, Water/Wastewater
The Chickasaw Nation, with funding from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), partnered with WSB to develop a prioritized list of mitigation strategies addressing the region’s most pressing natural hazards—wildfire, drought, and flooding. WSB’s role was to design a comprehensive suite of mitigation options for each hazard and apply a newly developed decision analysis tool from the U.S. EPA to help prioritize those strategies.
To define the objectives and measurable criteria for prioritization, WSB facilitated a series of collaborative meetings with the Chickasaw Nation and its partner, The Oka’ Institute. Together, they developed a community survey distributed across 25 communities to gather the data needed to build a robust decision matrix model.
To meet the requirement of creating individual decision models for each hazard in each community, 75 models in total, WSB developed a flexible template that incorporated all mitigation options and evaluation criteria. Survey responses were then used to populate the template, generating tailored models for each community and hazard.
This scalable and transparent approach allows the models to be updated as new data and funding become available, enabling the Chickasaw Nation to implement both structural and non-structural mitigation strategies with clarity and confidence.
