Last year, as part of his Climate Action Plan, the President established the State, Local, and Tribal Leaders Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience. The Task Force comprises Governors, Mayors, county executives and Tribal leaders from across the country who are experiencing climate change impacts.
On November 17th, the task force presented their recommendations for how the Federal Government can respond to the needs of communities nationwide that are dealing with extreme weather and other impacts of climate change. The Task Force organized its report across seven cross-cutting themes:
- building resilient communities;
- improving resilience in the Nation’s infrastructure;
- ensuring resilience of natural resources;
- preserving human health and supporting resilient populations;
- supporting climate-smart hazard mitigation and disaster preparedness and recovery;
- understanding and acting on the economics of resilience;
- and building capacity.
Additionally, the White House announced a new user-friendly climate resilience toolkit. The toolkit is meant for both the general public and professionals, and centralizes vast amounts of data and resources, like those available through the Climate Data Initiative and the National Climate Assessment. The toolkit initially focuses on the topics of coastal flood risk and food resilience. In the coming months, it will be updated to address additional areas such as water, ecosystems, transportation, and health. Some features of the Toolkit include:
- The Climate Explorer: A visualization tool that offers maps of climate stressors and impacts, as well as interactive graphs showing daily observations and long-term averages from thousands of weather stations across the Nation.
- Steps to Resilience: A five-step process that users can follow to initiate, plan, and implement projects to help make their homes, communities, and infrastructure more resilient to climate-related hazards.
- “Taking Action” Stories: More than 20 real-world case studies describing climate-related risks and opportunities that communities and businesses face, steps they’re taking to plan and respond, and tools and techniques they’re using to improve resilience.
- Federal Resource Database: The Toolkit provides centralized access to federal sites for future climate projections, as well as freely available tools for accessing and analyzing climate data, generating visualizations, exploring climate projections, estimating hazards, and engaging stakeholders in resilience-building efforts.
The Administration announced several other initiatives to support State, local, and Tribal climate resilience needs. Find out more HERE.
