The City of San Diego, measured against the UNDRR Disaster Resilience Scorecard
An independent assessment of 47 questions, scored entirely from documents the City and its own auditors already publish.
Summary
The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction publishes a 47-question scorecard that cities use to grade how ready they are for disaster. We ran it on San Diego, using only what the public can download. The City scored 51 out of a possible 126.
Main findings
- Very little is missing outright, and very little is finished. Four questions scored full marks and four scored zero. Twenty-nine scored a 1, which on this scale means the City says the thing exists and cannot show it working.
- San Diego writes good rules and raises real money. Building codes, stormwater standards, hazard identification and federal funding all scored at or near the top. The weakness is concentrated in operating, maintaining and recovering.
- The City has already graded itself on land use and failed. A self-audit inside the 2023 hazard mitigation plan answers “No” to whether the City’s land use maps identify hazard areas, and “No” to whether zoning keeps development out of them. The same document records 1,960 permits issued in hazard areas between 2018 and 2021.
- Shelter capacity is short by roughly six to one. The City lists 17 shelter sites holding 4,092 people for an actual stay. The earthquake scenario San Diego has been modeling since 2020 puts 24,000 people in need of a bed.
- There is no pre-event recovery plan. The City Auditor found in June 2025 that San Diego managed the January 2024 emergency but had no plan for what came after.
- Five questions cannot be answered from the public record at all, and three more documents exist but are not published, including the City’s Emergency Operations Plan.
Contents
About this assessment
The UN wrote this scorecard for city staff to fill in themselves, in a room, over a day or two. We did not do that. We scored San Diego from the outside, using only what anyone can download. That changes what the number means, so here is what it means.
This measures whether the City can show its work. The ten essentials are the steps: do you have a plan, do you know the risk, is the money set aside, do you build on safe ground, will the pipes hold, can you respond, can you rebuild. A high score means the answers are written down where the public can check them. A low score means they are not.
Three rules governed the scoring, and all three favor the City.
- Five of the 47 questions had no public document behind them. We left those unscored rather than mark them zero. Scoring them zero would put the result at 36 percent. Full marks on all five would put it at 47 percent.
- Where two City documents disagreed, we used the one that looked better for the City, and noted the conflict.
- Where a document exists but is not published, we scored what the City’s auditors say is inside it, not the fact that we cannot read it.
Every score in the full results carries a link to the document behind it.
Limitations
Showing your work is not the same as being ready. A city can write everything down and still fail on the day. A city can be quietly good at something and never put it in a document. From outside we cannot tell those apart, and we are not claiming to. What this assessment can tell a resident is whether they have any way to find out.
Two further limits should be stated plainly. First, the scorecard is designed as a facilitated group exercise, and a single external scorer will read some questions differently than a room of city staff would. Second, a document-based assessment measures transparency as much as capability, and those can come apart in both directions.
We have set out a process for correcting any score below. See Requests to the City.
Results by essential
| Essential | Score | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Organize for resilience | 3 / 9 | 33% | |
| 2 | Identify, understand and use current and future risk scenarios | 7 / 15 | 47% | |
| 3 | Strengthen financial capacity for resilience | 6 / 12 | 50% | |
| 4 | Pursue resilient urban development | 6 / 12 | 50% | |
| 5 | Safeguard natural buffers | 6 / 9 | 67% | |
| 6 | Strengthen institutional capacity | 7 / 18 | 39% | |
| 7 | Understand and strengthen societal capacity1 not scored | 3 / 9 | 33% | |
| 8 | Increase infrastructure resilience3 not scored | 5 / 18 | 28% | |
| 9 | Ensure effective disaster response1 not scored | 6 / 18 | 33% | |
| 10 | Expedite recovery and build back better | 2 / 6 | 33% |
Questions scored zero
Four questions scored zero. Each one comes from a document the City or its auditors published.
The City lists 17 shelter sites. They hold 7,754 people in an evacuation, or 4,092 for an actual stay. The earthquake scenario San Diego has been modeling since 2020 puts 36,000 households out of their homes and 24,000 people in need of a bed.
Both numbers are public. They sit in different documents, and neither one mentions the other.
The City “effectively managed the immediate emergency” but had no plan for recovery demands beyond its historical responsibilities.
City of San Diego Office of the City Auditor, June 2025. On this scorecard, a zero reads: no known plans.
San Diego has 1,148 miles of storm drain and 15 pump stations, most of them built in the 1940s. Seventeen percent of the channels can carry a hundred-year storm. The rest were built for a two-year or a five-year one.
In five years the City declared 50 stormwater projects emergencies and spent roughly $230 million on them. The backlog of service requests still grew by about 1,500 last year.
The only document that asks what happens in San Diego when one system takes another down was written in 2008. It does not name SDG&E. It does not name Caltrans. It does not name the trolley.
Areas of strength
Four questions earned full marks. What they have in common matters more than the score.
- Building codes. San Diego adopted the 2025 state code with its own additions. Builders have to test whether the ground will liquefy in a quake. Old brick buildings have to be bolted to their floors and roofs. Wood shingle roofs are banned.
- Stormwater design. Every project has to absorb its own rain where it falls. Big projects have to hold it on site and may only pipe it away if holding it is proven impossible.
- Attracting funding. $733 million in federal loans, roughly $235 million of it headed for Chollas Creek.
- Hazard identification. Identified, and updated on FEMA’s five-year clock. The next update lands February 2027.
San Diego writes good rules and raises real money. It is weaker at operating, maintaining and recovering. That pattern, rather than the headline number, is the useful finding.
Gaps in the public record
Five questions could not be scored at all, because no public document answers them.
- How many San Diego businesses could stay open after a disaster. Nobody counts.
- Whether the phone and internet networks would hold. No assessment exists.
- How many injured people the hospitals could take. Not published. The last public count of hospital beds in the county is from 2021. The earthquake scenario projects 13,600 injured in a daytime quake against roughly 4,200 licensed beds.
- Which schools would be damaged, and which sit in flood zones. The last statewide survey of school buildings was done in 2002.
- What supplies a disaster would need, and whether they exist. Never defined in public.
Three further documents exist. The City does not publish them.
- The City of San Diego Emergency Operations Plan. Not published, and carrying no public update date. The County publishes its own plan in full, with sixteen annexes.
- The annual preparedness review that identifies the region’s capability gaps. It cannot be read or audited by anyone outside the program.
- Emergency alert enrollment. The only public figure anywhere is 4,400 contacts messaged on February 22, 2024.
Conflicting City records
In two places the City’s own records disagree with each other.
- The 2023 hazard plan states that San Diego does not take part in FEMA’s flood rating program and that its floodplain administrator is not certified. The City’s own floodplain page states that it has held Class 7 since October 1, 2023.
- The same self-audit states that the building code contains no provisions requiring construction to be strengthened or elevated. The municipal code requires two feet of clearance above the flood line, and the earthquake and wildfire amendments are on the books.
One of each pair is wrong. Both are City records.
Requests to the City
We built this from what the public can read. If the City holds a document that changes a score, publish it and we will change the score, in public, and name it.
Three documents would move several scores at once. All three already exist.
- The City of San Diego Emergency Operations Plan, with its annexes.
- The capability gap summary from the annual Stakeholder Preparedness Review.
- A list of designated shelter sites, with the capacity of each.
The County’s Multi-Jurisdictional Hazard Mitigation Plan is currently being updated, with adoption expected in February 2027. That process is the natural place for this material to be addressed.
Full results, all 47 questions
Scores run 0 to 3. The exact wording of each level changes question to question. Broadly:
Essential 1Organize for resilience
Is there a plan, an agency with authority and resources, and a decision point where resilience actually enters City choices?
3 of 9 · 33%
| Ref | Question | Score | Basis and source |
|---|---|---|---|
| P1.1 | Plan making | 1 | Hazard mitigation planning runs on FEMA’s DMA 2000 cycle, not the Sendai Framework, and covers some of the Ten Essentials. Climate Resilient SD covers climate hazards only. |
| P1.2 | Organization, coordination and participation | 1 | City OES is budgeted at 17.37 FTE for a city of about 1.4 million, and reports EOC positions 81% staffed. The 2025 audit found the Mayor’s approval process for public communications deviated from best practices and caused delays. |
| P1.3 | Integration | 1 | Every project in San Diego fills out a Climate Action Plan checklist. It covers greenhouse gases. On resilience it says, in the City’s own words, that no action was included. Nothing in the budget or policy process asks whether a decision makes the city safer. Source: CAP Consistency Checklist technical support document |
Essential 2Identify, understand and use current and future risk scenarios
Does the City know what can happen, to whom, and what fails when something else fails?
7 of 15 · 47%
| Ref | Question | Score | Basis and source |
|---|---|---|---|
| P2.1 | Hazard assessment | 3 | Hazards are identified and the plan is updated on FEMA’s five-year cycle, with the next update targeting February 2027. Scored at face value, though the City ranks earthquake fifth of five while FEMA rates county earthquake risk Relatively High. |
| P2.2 | Shared understanding of infrastructure risk | 1 | The only document that asks how these systems depend on each other is from 2008 and does not name SDG&E, Caltrans or the trolley. The regional disaster council is the County and the 18 cities. No utility sits on it. Source: San Diego OA Critical Infrastructure Protection Plan (2008) |
| P2.3 | Knowledge of exposure and vulnerability | 1 | A citywide vulnerability assessment exists for climate hazards only. The sole Rose Canyon earthquake scenario is volunteer-produced by EERI, not a City product. Source: Climate Resilient SD; EERI San Diego scenario (2020) |
| P2.4 | Cascading impacts | 0 | Nobody has published anything on what happens in San Diego when one system takes down another. The only document that even asks is 18 years old. Source: San Diego OA Critical Infrastructure Protection Plan (2008) |
| P2.5 | Presentation and update process for risk information | 2 | Flood maps are current. A FEMA revision took effect March 3, 2026, and City code updates itself whenever FEMA redraws a map. How often the other hazard maps get updated is not published anywhere. |
Essential 3Strengthen financial capacity for resilience
Is there protected money, contingency, insurance cover and incentive?
6 of 12 · 50%
| Ref | Question | Score | Basis and source |
|---|---|---|---|
| P3.1 | Knowledge of approaches for attracting new investment | 3 | The City actively pursues and wins external funding: $733 million in EPA WIFIA credit agreements with roughly $235 million toward Chollas Creek, plus federal earmarks and state coastal funding. |
| P3.2 | Financial plan and budget for resilience | 1 | There is a $30 million emergency reserve for stormwater. Against it: a $7.81 billion five-year infrastructure gap, a stormwater construction budget cut from $88 million to $52.5 million, and a program the City says is funded at under 30% of what it needs. Source: IBA Report 26-11 (April 2026); Stormwater Five-Year Strategic Plan |
| P3.3 | Insurance | 1 | After the January 2024 flood, 1,179 damage-survey respondents had no flood insurance, and only about 4% of the county’s roughly 8,000 NFIP policies were in the hardest-hit areas. Source: inewsource, February 9, 2024 |
| P3.4 | Incentives | 1 | There are incentives for cool roofs and green roofs. There is no grant to flood-proof a house and nothing to help anyone brace a building against a quake. Sandbags are capped at ten per household and handed out empty. |
Essential 4Pursue resilient urban development
Do zoning, codes and enforcement keep people out of harm and build what survives?
6 of 12 · 50%
| Ref | Question | Score | Basis and source |
|---|---|---|---|
| P4.1 | Land use zoning | 1 | The City’s own Safe Growth Audit answers “No” to whether future land-use maps clearly identify natural hazard areas and “No” to whether zoning conforms to the comprehensive plan on hazard-restricted development, and records 1,960 permits issued in hazard areas from 2018 to 2021. Source: Safe Growth Audit, City annex to the 2023 County MJHMP |
| P4.2 | New urban development | 1 | The Climate Resilient SD implementation tracker contains no action directed at the Land Development Code, zoning, development standards or developer guidance. No resilience checklist or design guidance for private development exists. |
| P4.3 | Building codes and standards | 3 | San Diego adopted the 2025 state building code, with its own additions effective April 22, 2026. Builders must test whether the ground will liquefy in a quake. Old brick buildings must be bolted to their floors and roofs. Wood shingle roofs are banned. Flood loads are mapped. Source: City local amendments to the California Building Standards Code |
| P4.4 | Application of zoning, building codes and standards | 1 | The 2022 audit found code enforcement hitting its response-time goal 56% to 64% of the time, open cases nearly doubled to 6,306, and 31% of open cases never inspected at all. It also found the City’s published numbers overstated its real performance by 13 to 28 points. Nobody has audited it since. |
Essential 5Safeguard natural buffers
Does the City understand, value and use its natural infrastructure?
6 of 9 · 67%
| Ref | Question | Score | Basis and source |
|---|---|---|---|
| P5.1 | Awareness and understanding of ecosystem services | 2 | Functions are broadly understood through the MSCP and the Thriving Natural Environments actions. The only natural asset valued economically anywhere in the public record is street trees, at $595 million and about $24 million a year in benefits. |
| P5.2 | Integration of green and blue infrastructure | 3 | Every project has to soak up its own rain where it falls. Big projects have to hold that water on site first, and may only pipe it away if holding it is proven impossible. This is written into the Storm Water Standards Manual, so it is both a rule and a how-to. Source: Storm Water Standards Manual, Part 1: BMP Design Manual |
| P5.3 | Transboundary environmental issues | 1 | Every binding instrument on the Tijuana River watershed is federal-to-federal through the IBWC, including Minute 328 and Minute 333. The City of San Diego is not a party or signatory to any binational agreement, and no City financial contribution is disclosed. Source: EPA, IBWC Minute No. 333 |
Essential 6Strengthen institutional capacity
Skills, public education, data sharing, training, languages, learning from peers.
7 of 18 · 39%
| Ref | Question | Score | Basis and source |
|---|---|---|---|
| P6.1 | Skills and experience | 1 | The 2025 audit found the response team slow off the mark because the policies were not written down and the staff were not trained. The emergency operations center is 81% staffed. Source: City Auditor OCA-25-10 (June 2025); FY2026 OES budget |
| P6.2 | Public education and awareness | 1 | The 2025 audit found no comprehensive plan to communicate response and recovery information to all residents, resource flyers containing translation errors and inaccurate information, and no non-English provisions in the Emergency Operations Plan. No campaign reach data is published. |
| P6.3 | Data sharing | 1 | The City runs open data and dashboards. The code enforcement file has not been updated since January 2018. There is no building inspection file. The emergency plan, the yearly preparedness review and the shelter list are not published at all. |
| P6.4 | Training delivery | 1 | OES administers a Regional Training Program for FEMA-funded courses. No public evidence of a training offer spanning government, business, NGOs and community. Source: FY2026 OES budget |
| P6.5 | Languages | 2 | El Niño flyers are published in ten languages including Dari, Somali and Tagalog, which is above the norm for a US city. The 2025 audit nonetheless found translation errors and inaccurate information in resource materials. |
| P6.6 | Learning from others | 1 | No public evidence of participation in MCR2030 or any peer-city resilience network. Knowledge exchange appears ad hoc. |
Essential 7Understand and strengthen societal capacity
Are communities, businesses and at-risk residents part of the plan?
3 of 9 · 33% · 1 not scored
| Ref | Question | Score | Basis and source |
|---|---|---|---|
| P7.1 | Community or grassroots organizations, networks and training | 1 | After the flood, residents asked for town halls. The City said no. The audit calls that contrary to best practice. Meanwhile the City handed the human side of the recovery to nonprofits it had no plan to use. Seattle has 135 named neighborhood emergency hubs. San Diego has none. |
| P7.2 | Social networks, leave no one behind | 1 | Vulnerable population mapping exists through the Climate Equity Index and the Urban Heat Vulnerability Index. There is no access and functional needs registry and no regular training programme for at-risk populations. |
| P7.3 | Private sector and employers | Not scored | No public data exists on what share of San Diego businesses hold a documented business continuity plan reviewed within the last 18 months. Source: No public document exists. |
| P7.4 | Citizen engagement techniques | 1 | Multiple channels exist (AlertSanDiego, Genasys Protect, the SD Emergency app, 2-1-1, Get It Done for inbound reports). There is no complaints channel for storm risk, no published reach, and town halls were denied during the 2024 recovery. Source: City of San Diego, Stay Informed |
Essential 8Increase infrastructure resilience
Will the lifelines hold: water, energy, transport, communications, health, schools, first responders?
5 of 18 · 28% · 3 not scored
| Ref | Question | Score | Basis and source |
|---|---|---|---|
| P8.1 | Critical infrastructure overview | 1 | There is no current City plan for critical infrastructure. The most recent one is from 2008, and it leaves out SDG&E, Caltrans and the trolley. No standing group brings the utilities and the City together to talk about shared risk. Source: San Diego OA Critical Infrastructure Protection Plan (2008) |
| P8.2 | Protective infrastructure | 0 | Only 17% of San Diego’s storm channels are designed to handle a 100-year storm; some are built for 2- or 5-year events. Fifty stormwater projects were declared emergencies in five years at roughly $230 million, and the service-request backlog grew by about 1,500 last fiscal year. Source: KPBS, August 20, 2026 |
| P8.3 | Water, potable and sanitation | 1 | The earthquake scenario has water, sewer and gas out for months west of the fault, service cut from La Jolla to Coronado, and the big sewer lines into Point Loma broken. The City has never published its own study of how its pipes would hold. |
| P8.4 | Energy | 1 | The EERI scenario projects transmission and substation disruption in near-fault coastal areas. No outage duration estimate for a seismic event is published by SDG&E or the City. The September 2011 countywide outage is the nearest precedent. |
| P8.5 | Transport | 1 | Sixty roads closed in the January 2024 flood, a most-probable event. The Coronado Bridge seismic rehabilitation entered scoping only in November 2025. No City-level count of deficient bridges or seismic retrofit status list is published. |
| P8.6 | Communications | Not scored | No communications resilience assessment for the City exists in the public record. Source: No public document exists. |
| P8.7 | Health care | Not scored | No medical surge capacity figure is published for the City or County. The most recent public regional bed count is from 2021. For context, the EERI scenario projects 13,600 injured in a daytime Rose Canyon event against roughly 4,200 licensed beds countywide. Source: No public document exists. |
| P8.8 | Education facilities | Not scored | No San Diego Unified seismic inventory, no list of at-risk school buildings, and no overlay of school sites against flood zones. The only statewide inventory dates from 2002. Source: No public document exists. |
| P8.9 | First responder assets | 1 | The last study of whether San Diego has enough fire stations was done in 2017. It found four station areas out of dozens meeting the five-minute goal and called for at least ten more stations. There has been no study since. Source: Citygate Standards of Response Coverage Review (2017) |
Essential 9Ensure effective disaster response
Warning, plans, staffing, supplies, shelter, the EOC, and drills.
6 of 18 · 33% · 1 not scored
| Ref | Question | Score | Basis and source |
|---|---|---|---|
| P9.1 | Early warning | 2 | Wireless Emergency Alerts are opt-out and reach nearly every phone in a targeted polygon. Enrollment for every opt-in system is unpublished; the only public reach figure anywhere is 4,400 contacts messaged on February 22, 2024. |
| P9.2 | Event management plans | 1 | San Diego’s emergency plan is not published and has no public update date. The 2025 audit found it has no plan for recovery and nothing in it about communicating in any language but English. The County publishes its plan in full, with sixteen annexes. Source: City Auditor OCA-25-10; County OA Emergency Operations Plan |
| P9.3 | Staffing and responder needs | 1 | The City reports EOC positions 81% staffed against a goal of 100%. No surge roster size, mutual-aid staffing figure or Disaster Service Worker activation capacity is published. City staff worked more than 180,000 hours on the 2024 response. |
| P9.4 | Equipment and relief supply needs | Not scored | No published definition of equipment or relief supply needs linked to disaster scenarios. Source: No public document exists. |
| P9.5 | Food, shelter, staple goods and fuel supply | 0 | The City lists 17 shelter sites holding 7,754 people in an evacuation, or 4,092 for an actual stay. The earthquake scenario puts 36,000 households out of their homes and 24,000 people needing a bed. That is six people for every place to put them. |
| P9.6 | Interoperability and interagency working | 1 | A primary and an alternate EOC are confirmed to exist. No location, seat count, communications hardening or redundancy specification, or participating-agency roster is published. |
| P9.7 | Drills | 1 | The City ran two tabletop exercises this year, the kind done sitting down. The last full-scale drill anyone published a report on was in 2010. Source: FY2026 OES budget; County after action report library |
Essential 10Expedite recovery and build back better
Is there a recovery plan before the event, and does the City learn?
2 of 6 · 33%
| Ref | Question | Score | Basis and source |
|---|---|---|---|
| P10.1 | Post-event recovery planning, pre-event | 0 | The City Auditor found that the City effectively managed the immediate emergency but had no plan for recovery demands beyond its historical responsibilities. |
| P10.2 | Lessons learnt and learning loops | 2 | There is a real audit of the 2024 flood with 23 recommendations, and management agreed to all of them. The City Auditor does go back and check on things. Nobody has published what happened to those 23, and nothing shows the lessons reaching the crews who rebuild. |
References
- UNDRR. Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Cities: Preliminary Level Assessment. May 2017, January 2021 revision. mcr2030.undrr.org/disaster-resilience-scorecard-cities
- City of San Diego, Office of the City Auditor. Performance Audit of the City’s Disaster Response. OCA-25-10, June 2025. sandiego.gov
- City of San Diego, Office of the City Auditor. Performance Audit of the Development Services Department’s Code Enforcement Division. OCA-22-009, June 2022. sandiego.gov
- County of San Diego. Multi-Jurisdictional Hazard Mitigation Plan: City of San Diego Annex. 2023. sandiegocounty.gov
- EERI San Diego Chapter. San Diego Earthquake Planning Scenario: Rose Canyon Fault M6.9. 2020. sandiego.eeri.org
- City of San Diego, Independent Budget Analyst. Review of the Fiscal Year 2027 Proposed Budget. Report 26-11, April 2026. sandiego.gov
- KPBS. “With a strong El Niño on the way, only 17% of San Diego storm channels can handle a 100-year storm.” August 20, 2026. kpbs.org
- City of San Diego. Fiscal Year 2026 Adopted Budget: Office of Emergency Services and Fire-Rescue volumes. August 2025. sandiego.gov
- County of San Diego. Operational Area Critical Infrastructure Protection Plan. 2008. sandiegocounty.gov
- Citygate Associates. Standards of Response Coverage Review, City of San Diego. 2017. sandiego.gov
- Artivist.Media. “Reviewing San Diego’s El Niño page.” September 10, 2026. artivist.media
- FEMA. National Risk Index, version 1.20. December 2025. fema.gov
The source for each individual score is linked within the full results above.