Overview

The Climate Impacts Decision Support Tool (CIMPACT-DST) is an easy-to-use, Excel-based decision support tool that helps planning agencies and local governments incorporate climate change impacts into their jurisdiction’s planning and operations. By using CIMPACT-DST, urban planners and project developers can see policies, plans, regulations, and projects through a “climate lens.”

The tool is a resource for identifying and understanding local climate risks, and facilitates the use of this information to inform policy development and technical planning. It combines the latest climate change science and best-practice adaptation strategies with customizable policy inputs to provide projections and guidance that planners, policymakers, and project managers can use to inform planning and ensure consistency in their climate adaptation approach.

CIMPACT-DST brings together information about the impacts of climate change—information that is typically found in multiple places and is hard for non-scientists to interpret—into one place, using more accessible language. Planners can input the type, intended lifetime, and preferred location of their infrastructure project, and quickly find out what climate change impacts they need to worry about, and if available, what the city recommends they do about it in their project design and siting decisions. The content of the tool is customized on a case-by-case basis to ensure that the climate information and guidance for planners is both locally relevant and validated by planning policy-makers, managers, and reviewers.

See how it's been used in Vietnam here!

Audience

The CIMPACT-DST is useful for any government agency or organization that works on urban planning or development policies and projects. The tool has been used successfully by staff at all levels of government, including cities, counties, regional- and national-level planning agencies in the U.S. and abroad.

The tool can also be helpful to corporations with real estate or fixed asset holdings—for example, manufacturing or property development companies. The tool can help these corporations identify, understand, and manage climate-related risks to current or potential capital investments.