U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit

This report presents the common trends in how 12 local governments across the country developed and implemented stormwater policies to support green infrastructure. The local policies examined include interagency cooperation, enforcement and management issues, and integration with state and federal regulations. While a strong motivation for these policies and programs is innovation in stormwater management, many communities are moving past the era of single objective spending and investing in runoff reduction and stormwater management strategies that have multiple benefits. Green infrastructure approaches have a range of benefits for the social, environmental, and economic conditions of a community. Not only do these case studies include success stories for building a comprehensive green infrastructure program, but they also provide insight into the barriers and failures these communities experienced while trying to create a stormwater management system that includes more green infrastructure approaches.

Emeryville is the first city in California's Bay Area to update its Climate Action Plan and align its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions targets with the State of California’s climate targets. This Climate Action Plan 2.0 includes updates to Emeryville’s 2008 Climate Action Plan, looking towards state targets for reducing 40 percent below baseline levels of GHG emissions by 2030 and 80 percent below baseline levels by 2050. The CAP 2.0 meets the compliance for the Global Covenant of Mayors, a platform for standardizing climate change action planning for local city governments and demonstrating local commitment to climate change mitigation and adaptation. The plan contains GHG targets, updated GHG community and municipal inventories, business-as-usual GHG forecast, deep decarbonization vision for 2050, adaptation and mitigation action plans, and a monitoring plan. With 17 mitigation goals, five adaptation goals, over 100 combined initiatives for 2030, and five long-term strategies for 2050, this CAP 2.0 represents a strong step in reducing emissions and building climate resilience.

This plan evaluates the risks that different hazards pose to Berkeley and engages the community in dialogue to identify the most important steps that the city and its partners should pursue to reduce these risks. The plan updates the city's plan initially adopted in 2004. To develop the 2004 Disaster Mitigation Plan, the city conducted detailed research on four major natural and two major “man-made” hazards present in Berkeley: earthquake, wildland-urban interface fire, landslide, flood, hazardous materials release, and terrorism. Since that time, new maps and data depicting the extent and possible impacts from tsunami and climate change have become available. In 2011, the city added these hazards to the list and they are incorporated into this plan..

This assessment was a multidisciplinary research project that investigated future changes to southern Santa Barbara County climate, beaches, watersheds, wetland habitats, and beach ecosystems. The target audience is local land use planners and decision makers, and the main objective is to provide information that assists the cities of Santa Barbara, Carpinteria, and Goleta, the County of Santa Barbara, and UC Santa Barbara in climate adaptation planning with a clear focus on coastal ecosystems.

This Technical Report presents results from a large set of sectoral impact models that quantify and monetize climate change impacts in the U.S., with a primary focus on the contiguous U.S., under moderate and severe future climates. The report summarizes and communicates the results of the second phase of quantitative sectoral impacts analysis under the Climate Change Impacts and Risk Analysis (CIRA) project. The effort is intended to inform the fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4) of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). The goal of this work is to estimate climate change impacts and economic damages to multiple U.S. sectors (e.g., human health, infrastructure, and water resources) under different scenarios. Though this report does not make policy recommendations, it is designed to inform strategies to enhance resiliency and protect human health, investments, and livelihoods.

This report details the 2016 collaborative assessment project of the Upper Snake River Tribes Foundation and its member tribes—the Burns Paiute Tribe, the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe, the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, and the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes—and partners Adaptation International, the University of Washington, and Oregon State University. The project assessed climate change vulnerability for the Upper Snake River watershed in Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon, and combined the best available localized climate projections with traditional knowledge, tribal priorities, and local observations to develop quantitative vulnerability rankings for 16 species of shared concern and a qualitative assessment for an additional 12 shared concerns. The set of 28 shared concerns assessed for climate change vulnerability provided a balanced cross-section of the species, habitats, and resource issues important to the tribes. Along with this report, the project also produced eight summary sheets detailing specific species and habitat vulnerability.