Project Summary

Community climate change adaptation workshops are collaborative efforts designed to make climate adaptation locally relevant and to empower people to learn and take action. Many different formats, activities, and structures are currently used in these workshops, with little understanding of what methods work best for generating learning and collective action. EcoAdapt and Virginia Tech received funding from the National Science Foundation to identify consensus-based effective practices for promoting learning and action in adaptation workshops and to test those practices in eight communities across the United States.

The goal of this project is to improve understanding of what methods work best for generating learning and collective action in community climate adaptation workshops. The project is divided into two phases:

• Phase One is designed to identify consensus-based effective practices for promoting learning and action in adaptation workshops, and includes a Delphi study to synthesize beliefs about effective practices held by prominent workshop facilitators across the United States and a retrospective survey of adaptation workshop participants to evaluate learning and post-workshop action. 
• Phase Two is designed to understand how learning occurs in community climate adaptation workshops and how that learning does or does not contribute to collective action, and includes conducting eight adaptation workshops with communities across the United States.

The final Delphi report has been published and the retrospective survey is underway.

Community climate adaptation workshops have already been conducted in Santa Rosa, California and Johnson County, Iowa. Six additional workshops will be conducted in the remainder of 2021 and 2022.

Citation

Kershner, J. 2020. Evaluating the Effectiveness of Community Climate Adaptation Workshops [Summary of a project of EcoAdapt and Virginia Tech]. Retrieved from CAKE: https://www.cakex.org/case-studies/evaluating-effectiveness-community-climate-adaptation-workshops (Last updated September 2020)

Project Contacts