Investing in a climate resilient future
The Biden Administration recently announced that $6 billion in funding would be dedicated to improving the nation’s climate resilience capabilities. This money will be spent on strengthening the electrical grid, reducing flood risk, and community change grants.
Building a resilient community is a daunting task. It is intrinsically a community-level effort, rather than something that can be accomplished by a single individual. There are many different localized factors to consider, with at least as many solutions. Some communities may be exposed to flood risks, while for others drought poses a greater danger.
Luckily for community leaders, there is a ready-made framework for tackling these issues and planning for the future: the Climate Resilience Toolkit. The toolkit is a joint project from the National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center (NEMAC) and the National Oceanographic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA), and it provides a series of steps that can be followed to guide a group discussion of the risks posed to a community and tools to help address those risks. This could be a neighborhood, a city, a county, or whatever community is intent on addressing their climate risk.
The toolkit is “designed for interested citizens, communities, businesses, resource managers, planners, and policy leaders at all levels of government”. It is a framework and tools for community leaders to identify and address climate-related risks. Examples of such risks include extreme heat, heavy rainfall and associated flooding, and disruptions to the electrical grid, among many others.
Some of the material included in the toolkit:
- case studies from communities that have implemented climate resilience strategies
- a catalog of free online tools to help address resiliency
- the Steps to Resilience: a 5 step framework to guide discussion and implement resilience strategies
This toolkit is not something an individual takes and works with on their own, but all it takes is one driven person to begin the process in their community. The idea is to gather a team of committed and empowered parties who can use this framework to guide conversation, asking the right questions and finding the right answers.
