U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit

The Global Change Research Act of 1990 mandates that the U.S. Global Change Research Program deliver a report to Congress and the President no less than every four years that “1) integrates, evaluates, and interprets the findings of the Program…; 2) analyzes the effects of global change on the natural environment, agriculture, energy production and use, land and water resources, transportation, human health and welfare, human social systems, and biological diversity; and 3) analyzes current trends in global change, both human-induced and natural, and projects major trends for the subsequent 25 to 100 years.” The Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4) fulfills that mandate in two volumes. This report, Volume II, draws on the foundational science described in Volume I, the Climate Science Special Report. Volume II focuses on the human welfare, societal, and environmental elements of climate change and variability for 10 regions and 18 national topics, with particular attention paid to observed and projected risks, impacts, consideration of risk reduction, and implications under different mitigation pathways. Where possible, NCA4 Volume II provides examples of actions underway in communities across the United States to reduce the risks associated with climate change, increase resilience, and improve livelihoods. This assessment was written to help inform decision makers, utility and natural resource managers, public health officials, emergency planners, and other stakeholders by providing a thorough examination of the effects of climate change on the United States.

This report considers the economic, environmental, and social factors that contribute to resilience, and how the concept of resilience translates to the private sector, municipal decision makers, and communities. It summarizes key themes posed by the Urban Land Institute's resilience work in the years since Hurricane Sandy, with a particular focus on ULI’s resilience-focused Advisory Services work. Ten Principles was developed through a ULI member workshop in summer 2017, which included 15 ULI member leaders who had served on resilience-focused Advisory Services Panels and other Urban Resilience program activities over the past four years. The members attending the workshop formulated the ten principles, which are illustrated in the report with on-the-ground examples from Advisory Services panels.

This report (avialable here) describes a conceptual model of climate resilience, codified as an index. The Climate Resilience Screening Index (CRSI) is designed to be sensitive to changes in the natural environment, built environment, governance, and social structure and vulnerability or risk to climate events. CRSI has been used to develop an index score for climate resilience at the county level (scalable both upward and downward spatially). The index represents both the vulnerability of the entity to multiple climate events and the potential recoverability of these entities from climate events.

The approach uses five domains and 20 indicators related to the domains. CRSI characterizes holistic climate resilience throughout the US at the county level (2000-2015); ascertains the relationships among those domains and indicators; and, provide information regarding how that resilience score is constructed and the actions a community/county can take to improve their climate resilience.

The protocol developed and used in this report is unique in that it is an asset-level assessment of the vulnerability of infrastructure to multiple coastal hazards and climate change factors (e.g., erosion, flooding, storm surge, sea-level rise, and historical flooding) over a 35-year planning horizon (2050). The protocol was applied to all buildings and roads in Cape Lookout National Seashore; the results are summarized in the report.