Community / Local

This paper contributes to improving understanding of how funders, practitioners and other stakeholders can support and facilitate transformation in adaptation to climate change. It uses the latest academic literature, as well as learning from practice, to put forward a conceptual framework for determining the likelihood of an adaptation initiative delivering transformation. This framework unpacks the term ‘transformation’ into three components:

In the last ten years, many land management agencies and organizations have begun to integrate climate change strategies into their work. These plans range from mandatory climate actions to more general considerations of the ways that climate change will impact land and natural resources.

The pilot project developed in 2010-2012 and presented in this report is a contribution towards fostering climate change adaptation at the community level. The report’s emphasis is on the role and perspective of local landtrusts, acknowledging recent guidance on the need to incorporate a climate lens into local conservation planning (such as the Land Trust Alliance’s Climate Change Toolkit).

By pairing surveys and a public deliberative event with detailed household, neighborhood and county-level impacts data and visualization for sea-level rise associated coastal flooding and inundation, the Community Adaptation to Sea-Level Rise and Inundation project tested a new platform for increasing citizens’ engagement and discussion of local policy responses.

The costs of adaptation to climate change in developing countries have been estimated to reach $70 - $100 billion per year between 2010 and 2050. Unlocking private finance can support public decision-makers facing constrained public budgets to achieve climate resilience by leveraging the ingenuity, skills, and financial resources of businesses and the larger financial sector. Moreover, the private sector itself is gradually becoming aware of the physical risks and opportunities arising from a changing climate.

In 2007, Denver unveiled its Climate Action Plan and set a greenhouse gas reduction goal to reduce emissions by 10 percent per capita below 1990 levels. Denver is on track to meet this goal and continues to be proactive in reducing city-wide per capita emissions. However, the planet is warming and the resulting effects have the potential to harm Denver’s social, economic, and environmental sectors.

Climate change trends are and will have a fiscal and human impact on Boulder County over the next several decades. The current study quantifies the potential impact on Boulder County over infrastructure, human, and natural sectors to provide a broad understanding of the potential impact of climate change. The study incorporates multiple climate scenarios projections through 2050 to provide a range of possible outcomes and fiscal impacts.

Boulder has a long history of planning today for the challenges of tomorrow, creating innovative solutions, and undertaking successful resilience-building activities and projects. From its 40+ year legacy of open space preservation, to pioneering commitments to climate action goals, the community has supported some of the most progressive resilience activities in the country for decades, even before we saw them as building Boulder’s resilience.

A warming atmosphere is giving extra energy to storms, making the hurricanes, tornadoes, and thunderstorms of today more intense than those of the past. This trend is projected to accelerate in the years to come. These stronger storms are more likely to cause power outages, and the loss of power can be costly in terms of lives lost, economic impact, and public health. This fact sheet outlines strategies that local governments could implement to reduce the frequency and duration of power outages and help communities better withstand them when they do occur.