United States

 This white paper makes recommendations for action to reduce the serious health impacts of wildfires in California’s increasingly hot climate. The recommendations include new or expanded programs, funding streams, regulations, and research. The recommendations were developed by academics and practitioners at a UC Berkeley workshop in Spring 2019, a statewide webinar in July 2019, and through interviews with selected health/wildfire stakeholders. 

Disasters such as hurricanes can open a window of opportunity when these act as ‘focusing events’ on the policy agenda. This paper explores the ‘focusing power’ of Hurricane Sandy in the context of New York City during 2012 and beyond. To understand this, the authors ask how, and to what extent, Hurricane Sandy served as a focusing event to open a window of opportunity for the city to reevaluate its climate change adaptation policies.

Traditional and Indigenous knowledge and perspectives have not often been recognized in planning resources for climate adaptation in natural and cultural resource management. This webinar introduces participants to Dibaginjigaadeg Anishinaabe Ezhitwaad: A Tribal Climate Adaptation Menu, a new tool to assist in developing specific adaptation actions that recognize and incorporate tribal perspectives.

North Topsail Beach, North Carolina Case Study

This report captures the key outcomes from the Menominee Reservation Resilience Dialogues process, which took place between May 15 and May 26, 2017. The Resilience Dialogues partners with communities to explore their risks from climate variability and change. Using a professionally facilitated, online process to connect community leaders to a network of vetted national experts, the Resilience Dialogues helps them work together to understand risks and lay the groundwork for long-term resilience.

From devastating monsoons to sea level rise, extreme weather is taking its toll across the globe. Surging Waters looks at flooding in the United States and demonstrates how science is supporting flood management, as well as furthering the solutions needed to mitigate flood impacts on people and property in the future. The report’s authors highlight three types of flooding—flooding due to hurricanes, flooding in the central U.S., and coastal flooding—through local stories. In 2017, Houston, Texas, was hit by Hurricane Harvey, the second most damaging weather disaster in U.S.

There is broad interest in the United States in identifying key factors of community resilience and understanding where we stand as a Nation related to those factors so that we can develop better-informed capacity-building strategies. The Mitigation Framework Leadership Group has developed a draft concept with potential indicators and measures of community resilience that may be considered by a variety of users when evaluating how to improve communities’ ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters.  The Draft Concept Paper documents the approach.  

The Upper Snake River Watershed has been home to humans for more than 10,000 years. Many of their ancestors still reside on the landscape and are members of the Burns Paiute Tribe, Fort McDermitt PaiuteShoshone Tribe, Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of the Fort Hall Reservation, and Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Reservation. Together, these four member tribes comprise the Upper Snake River Tribes (USRT) Foundation.