October 26–28, 2020 | Durham, NC

Abstracts for Session 7B: Wednesday 10:15–11:45

Session 7B
Measuring Up: Climate Assessments to Inform Successful Adaptation
CAROLINA B

 What's Going On   How Assessments Can Inform — and Empower — Community Resilience

Matt Hutchins — UNC Asheville's NEMAC
Karin Rogers — UNC Asheville's NEMAC
Jim Fox — UNC Asheville's NEMAC
Nina Hall — UNC Asheville's NEMAC

Communities are increasingly engaging in climate resilience planning to better address threats such as flooding, sea level rise, wildfire, and other events. Assessments are widely conducted, and accepted, as a critical part of this planning process. Planners and practitioners, however, employ a myriad of different approaches when conducting these assessments, and there are few standards or guiding principles detailing what an assessment should provide or—and perhaps more importantly—how an assessment can be used in these planning processes.

The lack of standardization in resilience assessments creates uncertainty about why a community would conduct one and often results in practitioners undervaluing what they can bring to the planning process. A quantified resilience assessment based on the concepts of vulnerability and risk can help a community understand the unique problems it faces—and can help it move beyond assessment into identifying and prioritizing targeted strategies to build resilience.

This presentation draws upon work that UNC Asheville’s NEMAC is undertaking with communities throughout the Southeast to highlight the role assessments have in resilience planning, focusing on the notion that an assessment should not be viewed as an end to itself—rather, it should empower a community by informing the planning process.

Connections   Supporting Climate Action through Assessments: Creating a US Sustained Assessment Infrastructure

Jessica Whitehead — North Carolina Sea Grant and Independent Advisory Committee on Applied Climate
Richard Moss — Independent Advisory Committee on Applied Climate Assessment and Columbia University
Anne Waple — Studio30K
Melissa Stults — University of Michigan

Join us to learn how to get involved with the launch of a new consortium of organizations dedicated to supporting states, local communities, indigenous populations, and other sub-national actors by improving the quality, relevance, and utility of decision-relevant climate information. During the Global Climate Action Summit, we launched the new consortium, Climate Assessment, as well as released a roadmap for extending the National Climate Assessment to applications of climate science in practitioner-defined challenge areas such as regulating, designing, or building climate-ready infrastructure (transportation, housing, communications, etc.); assessing inland flooding to build community preparedness; protecting coastal properties from erosion; maintaining water supply; meeting mandated standards for water quality in rivers/lakes; preparing for and reducing future risk of wildfire; and many others.

The goal of the Climate Assessment consortium is to increase the usability of climate information and applications and help society limit climate change and prepare for and be more resilient to an uncertain climate future. There are also a number of interactive opportunities for participants to provide insights, feedback, and suggestions for our priority areas of work for the next 18 months.

During this session, we will ask you for your input on how Climate Assessment can support:

• What are your practitioner needs as you advance climate action?

• What strategies do you want to see that build capacity for more scientists, organizations, and practitioners to work together to effectively assess and apply information on climate risk and opportunities in mitigation and adaptation action?

• How do we improve the connectedness of federal and non-federal assessment efforts to provide a seamless suite of trustworthy, actionable, and up-to-date climate-related information?

• How can Climate Assessment support transitional as well as transformational adaptation actions across scales and sectors?

All are welcome to attend but we seek involvement of state, local, and tribal governments as well as civil society actors, universities, professional societies, consultants/research firms, businesses, and non- governmental organizations.

Connections   Visioning Resilience: What Successful Resilience Looks Like in Practice

Rachel Jacobson — American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP)
Missy Stults*University of Michigan
Richard Moss — Interdependent Advisory Committee on Applied Climate Assessment and Columbia University
   * Missy Stults originally organized this session, but is unable to attend the rescheduled conference. Rachel Jacobson has graciously offered to give her presentation and lead this discussion in her absence.

We all know the old adage, “you can’t effectively manage what you don’t measure.” The essence of the adage is that it’s incredibly challenging to know if something is getting better or worse if you don’t measure it or the indicators associated with it. But what does that mean for the fields of adaptation and resilience?

While a bit more “wicked” of a problem than many of fields, as the resilience/adaptation field matures, it is becoming necessary that we have mechanisms to gauge what practices are leading us towards greater resilience and which are not. Effectively, we need systems that will help us evaluate our practices, approaches, tools, and services to determine the effect they are having (or not) on enhancing resilience. This need isn’t academic; it’s practical. As the demand for climate adaptive services, knowledge, tools, and resources grows, the field will need of way of determining which contributions or practices are worth investing in, which need to be improved, and which are not effective. But building this evaluation framework necessitates an understanding of where we are trying to head, in essence, what is resilience in practice.

And that’s where you come in. To create an evaluation framework for the resilience field we need the insights of practitioners, thought leaders, investors, and scholars. We need you to tell us what you think successful resilience looks like. What will it look like when your neighborhood is resilient? What will it look like when your community is resilient? What about the economy, your state, or you personally?

In this session you will have the opportunity to share your insights through a combination of mechanisms:

1. Interactive online, real-time polling;

2. Paper surveys and ideation forms; and

3. Live question, answer, and open discussion with the two proposed moderators/facilitators.

Insights shared during this session (as well as all the other regional adaptation forums) will be used to draft an evaluation framework for the resilience field. The draft framework — which will be shared widely through webinars, via our and partner networks, at resilience conferences, and via an online website — will serve as a foundation for future work to build a more holistic evaluation framework for the adaptation/resilience field. Importantly, the products we propose developing as part of this proposal would belong to all.

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