3 Ways Collaboration Can Foster Climate Resilience

Climate change is a formidable problem, with complex interdependencies and mixed messaging often clouding an understanding of its effects and possible solutions. The impacts of climate change span human health, transportation, infrastructure, food and water security, industry supply chains, financial markets, and global development. Further complicating the problem is the fact that marginalized communities across the U.S. will be especially exposed to climate change impacts, and often face barriers that can prevent or delay meaningful adaptation efforts.

Collaboration between diverse community stakeholders is a critical pathway to overcoming these barriers. National Resilience Guidance released by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) calls collaboration central to resilience. Collaboration is also a unifying theme of the White House’s 5th National Climate Assessment (NCA5). That report provides an authoritative assessment and offers stories of meaningful community climate action, but avoids policy recommendations. By acting upon NCA5’s observations and FEMA’s National Resilience Guidance, localized solutions implemented collaboratively by diverse stakeholders can achieve the speed and scale necessary to build effective climate resilience.

These three foundational approaches to collaboration can provide useful guidance for undertaking such work:

1. Align on values among climate resilience stakeholders and identify efficiencies to alleviate competition for scarce resources.

With limited time, budget, and workforce available for building localized climate resilience, aligning community values to achieve efficiencies is essential. Resilient communities naturally tend to build toward what they value. If a community values clean air, water, and the security of its surrounding environment, then citizens will often attempt to collectively defend those issues with policies and funding. Federal and state programs (such as Resilient Florida grants) and targeted legislation can streamline access to funding for community efforts to include resilience goals in future planning.

Collaboration can also help mitigate competition for limited resources through the sharing of best practices among citizens and other stakeholders. Stakeholders with specialized knowledge, such as engineers, urban planners, the insurance industry, and consultants, can serve to inform inclusive community decision making via long-term risk assessments and return on investment analyses, particularly in the implementation of transformational climate adaptation measures. For example, collaboration across southwestern states in 2023 staved off a historic Colorado River water crisis. By proactively investing in collaborative adaptation measures today, communities can align on values, work through competing claims on limited resources, and avoid paying billions of dollars down the road when major disasters hit.

2. Leverage scenario planning to reduce the complexity and uncertainty of resilience solutions.

Understanding the effects of climate change—and how scientists convey uncertainty about those effects—is difficult at the community level. Oftentimes, communities are unable to consider the cascading impacts of well-intended but uncoordinated actions within natural and built environments. As an example, establishing a new parking area may solve a community’s parking problem, but it can compound other problems such as traffic, flooding, and the urban heat island effect.

Chapter 18 of the NCA5 report illustrates how participatory, community-led collaborations between city, tribal, state, and federal entities have been effective in the face of tough climate challenges. Scenario planning using frameworks like the Climate Resilience Toolkit or immersive tools such as digital twins can provide ways to make future conditions tangible to diverse stakeholders. Take, for instance, coastal communities facing a rising number of sunny-day and King Tide flood events. A digital twin can illuminate forward-thinking adaptation options for communities by combining future climate scenarios, like the Climate Mapping for Resilience and Adaptation, with models of various adaptive stormwater management measures. Immersive scenario planning tools can bring communities together and reduce uncertainty by simulating the possible outcomes of various decision pathways in real time, allowing them to choose the path that best aligns with their values, priorities, and resources.

3. Solidify climate resilience foundations with community-informed policy.

Even with the right climate information and strong collaborative relationships in place, any resilience measures will likely be short-lived or impossible to even begin if a community lacks the means to follow through with policy or funding. Federal and state policy have a role to play to enable or incentivize meaningful local climate action. Collaboration between municipal, tribal, federal, and state partners is paramount if resilience is to become a typical reality.

This is where collaboration via community-focused organizations like Ten Across—a convener of diverse stakeholders driven to advance resilience by building connections and sharing information—can help bring together the right stakeholders across different sectors. Collaborative efforts between citizens, businesses, and other partners to develop community-wide resilience plans can promote broad buy-in, especially when the process incorporates diverse and equitable input across stakeholders. Additionally, collaborative agreements between federal agencies and professional organizations, like the 2023 agreement between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the American Society of Civil Engineers, can empower communities to institute updated building codes that are designed to withstand future climate impacts.

There are encouraging signs that communities across the nation are beginning to take more proactive and collaborative climate action. In the past few years, at least 14 states and dozens more communities, like Jacksonville, Mobile, and Charleston, have established chief resilience officers and engaged their citizens in measures—such as mapping urban heat island effects—that are aimed at developing a community-focused blueprint for a resilient future.

The communities and government agencies that embrace these foundational collaboration approaches will develop strength through scale and speed, and deliver a resilient road map for navigating a volatile climate future.