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Effective risk communication is necessary to reduce the billions of dollars in damage and hundreds of fatalities that occur yearly from floods in the United States. The purpose of this report is to help Department of Homeland Security officials identify ways to improve protective action flood guidance in response to growing flood risks that continue to cause adverse effects and threaten lives and property. Drawing on a review of academic and grey literature, authors used a conceptual framework, which was operationalized to review Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)'s flood protective action guidance through the lens of a social-ecological model—comprising individual, relationship, community, and societal factors. Authors then took a broader look at risk communication best practices to collect principles that could help improve the effectiveness of flood risk communication, and developed recommendations for implementation. This study resulted in key findings and related recommendations that should help FEMA improve its flood communication strategy and messaging. First, components of the social-ecological model can be used to understand how people respond to protective action guidance and to develop a communication strategy tailored to the needs of the target audience. Second, partnering with the community can improve communication, which requires a reciprocal relationship between the organization seeking to communicate and the intended audience. Third, establishing flood messaging standards, including general readability, can help build an understanding of how messages might interact and be received by different audiences and can guide the development of messages that are more likely to result in protective action.

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The Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center (HSOAC) was tasked with using the National Risk Management Center's (NRMC's) National Critical Function (NCF) risk assessment framework to assess risk to each NCF and complete individual risk analyses for the 55 NCFs. The NRMC also requested that HSOAC perform additional tasks, including providing a report on emerging lessons learned from risk management efforts to limit the impact and disruption that coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) had on the 55 NCFs. This report presents insights into best practices in risk assessment; challenges in the implementation of the NCF risk assessment framework to characterize risk to critical infrastructure associated with the COVID-19 pandemic; recommendations for improving the framework; and suggestions for further characterization of NCFs' interdependence, vulnerability, and geographic variation that could improve risk assessment processes.