Building a Climate-Ready North Carolina
Collider members work with NOAA’s Climate Program Office to increase collaboration among state agencies in North Carolina’s new Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan
By Mickey Snowdon, Communications Liaison at The Collider
On June 2, 2020, the State of North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality (NCDEQ) released its Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan, or the NC Resilience Plan for short. The purpose of the plan is to assess the impacts of climate change on services, resources, and personnel in the state and provide a clear path forward for state agencies to implement climate adaptation and resilience planning into their programs, operations, and policies. The NC Resilience Plan was a direct result of Governor Cooper’s Executive Order 80 (EO80), which outlines a number of clean energy goals for the state to accomplish by 2025.
Collider Members Contribute
In a broad sense, the NC Resilience Plan combines two major pieces: climate science and adaptation. The North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies (NCICS), an institutional member of The Collider, was responsible for fulfilling the climate science portion of the plan through their creation of the North Carolina Climate Science Report (NCCSR), published in March 2020.
The NCCSR serves as an independent, peer-reviewed scientific assessment on climate change impacts throughout the state. To complete the report, NCICS utilized a similar process as they use to contribute to the quadrennial National Climate Assessments (NCA). Like the NCAs, the NCCSR is intended to be read by the general public.
Though a scientific assessment is critical, it’s the actions that accompany it that build climate resilience and spur adaptation. The climate adaptation portion of the plan was accomplished by the US Climate Resilience Toolkit (CRT) team, composed entirely of Collider members. Led by Ned Gardiner, CRT Engagement Manager for NOAA’s Climate Program Office (CPO), the CRT team included Jim Fox, former Director of the University of North Carolina at Asheville’s National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center (NEMAC), and Aashka Patel, a Resilience Specialist working with NEMAC.
Over five months, the CRT team facilitated four workshops with dozens of state agency representatives to better coordinate programs that are susceptible to climate-related impacts. Through these workshops, agencies established a framework for evaluating climate-related vulnerability, exposure, and risk.
Before the CRT team could help the state agencies define the impacts they each face, they had to establish a common vocabulary among their representatives. The team utilized the CRT’s Steps to Resilience (StR) framework to conduct a climate impact analysis that examined climate and non-climate stressors and hazards that various government agencies may face. The team emphasized the interrelatedness of these climate hazards and explained how they impact services and resources managed by individual agencies. They also identified populations most at risk to vulnerability, exposure, and risk, and identified actions to build resilience to climate-related events. From this process, departments were able to outline ways in which they could measure impacts and adaptation over time, plus the probability, frequency, and intensity of climate hazards.
The CRT team’s work exceeded simple assessment by getting people to think about impacts to assets, resources, populations, programs, and responsibilities that governments have at different levels.
Gardiner says the team is taking federal data and finding opportunities at local levels to innovate products and services to benefit individual communities. The Resilience Plan represents a level of analysis and support that our state needs to understand if it’s going to bridge the gap between federal support and local adaptation. Gardiner says it’s critical that we understand how state government works through its Councils of Government (COGs) and municipalities to receive resources for local adaptation.
Funding
Fox explains that although EO80 is a huge step in the right direction for the state, the Governor’s mandate comes with no funding. To date, there has been no legislative action on climate adaptation in the state even though NC is experiencing more — and more severe — tropical cyclones, floods, heatwaves, wildfires, and landslides. He says the state’s transportation systems are massively at risk, and in order to address climate adaptation, we need to put resources in place — a task that requires funding.
The federal government has acknowledged that funding for adaptation to climate-related hazards garners up to a 4:1 return when planning ahead for climate hazards. Adaptation planning saves lives and increases peoples’ quality of life. But in order for state agencies to make a reasonable fiscal case for adaptation to the state legislature, he says it’s critical that they agree on their priorities and cooperate with one another.
Though funding for climate change is often difficult to obtain, there are opportunities. FEMA is the main federal agency that allocates funding to response and recovery efforts, and has recently unveiled a new funding program approved by Congress called Building Resilience for Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC). BRIC sets aside six percent of all disaster dollars to go towards resilience planning because federal agencies are starting to see the value in not having to respond and recover to a steadily growing number of billion-dollar disasters.
Scalability
One of the main benefits of the CRT team’s approach is that their StR are designed to be scaled from the federal level down to the municipal level. Gardiner explains this is important because the federal government doesn’t understand the unique threats and challenges that individual municipalities face nearly as well as local leadership does. Impacts to assets, populations, and resources, as well as programs that a city or COG manages, requires local insight, information, and specific analysis.
Patel says that when the StR are applied at a local level, the focus is heavily on residential or business assets that local governments own or wish to protect. However, states themselves own few assets. She helped the team expand the concept of “assets” to include state-level legal responsibilities and services, in addition to physical assets, populations, and personnel.
During the workshops, Patel explained that because states play more of a regulatory and provisional role to local and regional governments, agencies need to focus on more than just their assets — they must also consider the programs they operate, the regulatory roles they play, and the services they provide to communities. For example, she points out that some agencies manage their buildings’ inventories, while others provide public health services.
Gardiner says even though the responsibilities presented by climate change are very real, the federal government doesn’t have the capacity to do a meta-analysis for every community in the US. Therefore, the cost-benefit ratio determined by the federal government of investing in resilience justifies bringing in local decision-makers to work with consultants that can enter into a project equipped with GIS specialists, emergency managers, and/or transportation planners poised to explore hyper-local hazards.
According to Gardiner, the collaboration between climate service providers and local governments creates a national roadmap for how quantitative, site-specific analyses can be done, and serves as a federal funding case for adaptation.
Building Capacity
Creating consistency is key for building capacity within systems. Fox and Gardiner emphasize that encouraging people to use a standardized process for conducting a climate assessment allows anyone talking about concepts like vulnerability to be discussing the same thing. This idea is brave because of its novelty — there currently is no standard for climate assessments or adaptation plans in the US. Fox and Gardiner fully believe that creating a common foundation will allow our country to better prepare for future climate impacts.
“I think we’re just beginning to understand the scope of the problem. Our recent experience with flooding throughout North Carolina has raised the importance of the state’s adaptation plan to a national level. I think we have a good foundation to build from if we can act soon, together,” Gardiner says.
Fox says that too often, individual departments and sectors see risk and vulnerability through their own lenses. In order to help them consider climate vulnerability — which pertains to all departments — Patel says the team asked representatives many different questions regarding their assets and services. While NCDEQ and the Department of Emergency Management have been thinking about climate vulnerability for a long time, she says it’s a new way of thinking for some departments.
The ability for agencies to collectively adapt to climate-related risks and build resilience to future hazards hinges on their capacity to communicate effectively. According to Gardiner, getting the health and transportation departments and emergency response officials speaking the same language is a critical step. With support from the CRT team, NC officials identified 744 potential climate-related impacts to state government. Understanding these threats presents the perfect opportunity for disparate departments to work together on planning, operations, capital improvements, services, regulations, and other roles that state government plays.
Shifting Generations
Fox says the team actually put out the first version of the NC Resilience Plan in 2011, but the accompanying legislation and cultural changes needed to enact it never occurred. He says the state now has another opportunity to put this plan into motion, but unless it is able to get those accompanying pieces in place, the plan won’t bear fruit.
While it is critical that our country adapts to a changing climate as quickly as possible, Fox says this will ultimately require a generational shift. “There’s a lot of material [in the NC Resilience Plan] that we are going to be carrying forward and handing off to the next generation.”
According to Fox, part of this generational shift includes the need for climate expertise. He is concerned that the climate will continue to worsen and the US won’t have a trained workforce to address these challenges. He says that while he and Gardiner have invested heavily in their careers, they are ultimately passing on the torch to the next generation to implement their work.
“Unfortunately there are a lot of people my age that need to step aside and allow this new reality to unfold. We’re laying the foundation, just as people once laid the foundations for cathedrals they knew they’d never see completed. But we need to speed this up because a changing climate is causing problems at a rate faster than our society is moving right now,” he says.
