Prior Grants

Recipient: 18 organizations

Project Partners: Fernleaf

CRF is pleased to announce new awards to 18 organizations through its Coordination and Collaboration in the Resilience Ecosystem Program. These grants provided funding to train 23 climate service practitioners who will support efforts to scale up and accelerate equity-centered adaptation planning across the U.S. CRF has provided additional support to our partners at Fernleaf to design and lead the Training, as well as to four organizations that will participate in the Training as subject matter expert lecturers.

Grants were made on a competitive basis to organizations that are interested in learning to utilize the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit’s (CRT) Steps to Resilience to help communities plan and prepare for climate-related impacts proactively.

Trainees will be pre-qualified as practitioners for NOAA’s Climate Smart Communities Initiative (CSCI), which will be administered by the Climate Resilience Fund and is expected to launch in 2023, if funding becomes available (see RFA document for details).

These trainees will also have the opportunity to be included as vetted practitioners listed on the Climate Adaptation Practitioner Registry, a resource for communities that are seeking expertise and assistance with climate resilience planning and action.

CRF has awarded $200,000 to 18 different organizations to support 23 Steps to Resilience Trainees:

• University of Maryland
• ICF
• CAPA Strategies
• Coastal Quest
• Great Plains Tribal Water Alliance
• Arizona State University
• Antioch University of New England
• The Coastal States Organization
• Optimum Climate Weather & Environment
• ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability
• Model Forest Policy Program
• Climate Adaptation Partners
• University of Oklahoma
• EcoAdapt
• Geos Institute
• Climate Resolve
• Greenbelt Alliance
• University of Minnesota

Recipient: American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP)

Project Partners: Climate Resilience Consulting

The American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP) and their partners at Climate Resilience Consulting will create a ready-to-fund Resilience Guidebook by seeking insights from practitioners and advisor networks, reviewing grey and peer-reviewed literature, organizing and validating information to identify themes and gaps, and creating case studies and examples of working strategies. ASAP will work with the US Climate Resilience Team to integrate the new guidance developed into a practitioner and training guide for climate service practitioners.

Recipient: National Wildlife Federation (NWF)

Project Partners: EcoAdapt

The National Wildlife Federation (NWF) and its partners at EcoAdapt will draw on existing literature and the Federation’s extensive experience to develop a best practices guide for employing nature-based solutions to reduce climate impacts and risks to communities. The project team will work with Climate Resilience Toolkit staff to advise on where and how nature-based solutions can be more fully integrated into the Steps to Resilience planning framework.

Recipient: Antioch University’s Center for Climate Preparedness and Community Resilience

Project Partners: CREW, Eastie Farm

The Antioch project team, together with partners in Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities, will review and summarize existing best practices for community engagement in climate adaptation planning that integrates diversity, equity, and inclusion. The team will create a white paper that summarizes the findings and will refine the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit’s Steps to Resilience to include these lessons learned.

Recipient: EcoAdapt

Project Partners: Adaptation Insight

EcoAdapt and partners at Adaptation Insight will review and synthesize approaches, indicators, and metrics for evaluating adaptation project and program effectiveness at meeting a range of goals, including social, environmental, economic, and climate hazard risk-reduction. The project will develop an interactive catalog of indicators and metrics to support practitioners in designing context-appropriate adaptation processes. EcoAdapt and partners at Adaptation Insight will work with the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit staff to develop trainings based on findings.

Recipient: Earth Economics

Project Partners: U.S. Forest Service

Building ecosystem resilience on US Forest Service (USFS) land is critically important to preserving these natural assets in a changing climate. Earth Economics builds upon existing partnership with USFS to integrate its ecosystem service valuation framework—which provides dollar values for ecosystem services produced by forest lands—with the existing USFS decision-support tool, called the Conservation Finance Opportunities Map. This project will leverage an ecosystem service valuation approach to quantify the economic, social, and environmental value created by the natural and built infrastructure on USFS land— these are the “Values at Risk” of being lost to fire and pests, which can be protected by restoring forests to a more resilient state. Combining valuation methodologies with the Map will help make the business case to potential conservation finance investors that spending on nature-based solutions in and around our national forests is an effective way of building community resilience and ecosystem health.

Recipient: Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals, Northern Arizona University Foundation

Project Partners: Swinomish Indian Tribal Community

Indigenous peoples experience some of the most devastating impacts from climate change. Many Indigenous people view environmental impacts as symbiotically connected to community health impacts and as such they must be evaluated together. Yet there are no established community health evaluation methods that reflect the interconnected Indigenous view of health; assessments rely primarily on technical physical and physiological data from climate models, with limited local knowledge and little to no values-driven community data. Values-driven data provide important information about how people define what a health community means, their priorities, and preferred actions to maintain or improve health. This project will redesign the existing climate health modules developed by the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community to better engage, communicate with, and support resilience in diverse Indigenous communities from different regions who have unique worldviews and perspectives and who are often on the frontlines of climate change impacts and action planning.

Recipient: American Forests

Project Partners: CAPA Strategies, State of Rhode Island

Climate change is widely considered one of the greatest challenges to human survivorship, especially among those who have less access to resources and support. One of the more profound and insidious – yet largely misunderstood – disasters to affect humans and the built environment is urban heat. Exposure to heat claims more lives than all other natural disasters combined, yet fatalities to humans and impacts on infrastructure are largely preventable. A well understood strategy to reduce extreme heat is the use of greening techniques, particularly tree plantings. Trees provide essential shade, evapotranspiration the heat which increases cooling potential, and their capacity to provide these ‘ecosystem services’ increases as they mature and grow larger and older.

American Forests has pioneered an evidence-based and technologically astute approach to addressing urban tree inequities with a Tree Equity Score. The project will 1) implement the Tree Equity Score for every urbanized neighborhood in the State of Rhode Island, which will measure how well the benefits of urban tree canopy are reaching low income communities, populations of color and populations that are particularly susceptible to extreme heat; (2) conduct a community-based urban heat field campaign in four municipalities within the State of Rhode Island — Providence, East Providence, Pawtucket, and Central Falls; and (3) scale the empirical results from the four municipalities to the whole State, while integrating results into the Tree Equity Score. The scaling of the Tree Equity Score model is one of the penultimate aims of the urban heat campaigns, which, over time and with sufficient data, will support the creation of a national ambient temperature and humidity dataset.

Recipient: Local Government Commission

Project Partners: Alliance of Regional Collaboratives for Climate Adaptation, Bay Area Climate Adaptation Network, Central Coast Climate Collaborative, Capital Region Climate Readiness Collaborative, Los Angeles Regional Collaborative for Climate Action, North Coast Resource Partnership, San Diego Regional Climate Collaborative, Sierra Climate Adaptation and Mitigation Partnership

As central as equity is to creating resilient communities, calls for the prioritization of equity in adaptation processes and projects remain largely unanswered. Deliberate action must be taken to address the deeply entrenched challenges that have hindered meaningful progress – from capacity and resource constraints to all forms and expressions of systemic racism in the adaptation field. Embedding Equity in Adaptation seeks to mitigate these challenges by leveraging the Alliance of Regional Collaboratives for Climate Adaptation (ARCCA) to set in motion an accelerated cycle of learning, institutionalizing, and implementing equity principles and practices. ARCCA will leverage existing resources and work with regional climate collaboratives to build equity awareness, expertise, and capacity among adaptation practitioners; integrate equity into governance structures and the Adaptation Capability Advancement Toolkit; and provide technical assistance to support the local implementation of replicable strategies.

Recipient: Bonneville Environmental Foundation

Project Partners: CalTrout, City of Portland, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Clean Water Services, EcoTrust, US Forest Service, North Santiam Watershed Council, Northwest Natural Resource Group, One Tree Planted, Oregon Department of Agriculture Water Resources Program, Oregon State University and Extension, Pierce Conservation District, Seattle Parks and Recreation/Green Seattle Partnership, Skagit River System Cooperative, Upper Columbia United Tribes, WSU Extension, Wisdom of the Elders

This project seeks to build a literal and figurative through-line across human networks and riparian corridors to sustain culturally important species and their ability to support future generations of plants and people in mitigating and adapting to climate change. Thousands of miles of Pacific Northwest (PNW) riparian forests are degraded, and dozens of individual Tribes, watershed groups, nurseries and agencies work to improve riparian conditions, planting millions of trees and shrubs annually for restoration. As assisted migration of native plant materials gains traction as a PNW climate adaptation and mitigation strategy, the absence of a regional network of non-profit, Tribal and agency restoration practitioners and partners, including nurseries and Extension research, hampers collective capacity to scale strategic solutions. This work will integrate numerous existing efforts in a learning and action network that will increase community capacity to care for the riparian forests essential to healthy watersheds, fish, wildlife and people, and create new restoration partnerships and mechanisms to centralize and share information.

Recipient: Headwaters Economics

Project Partners: Adaptation International and two NOAA Regional Integrated Science and Assements Programs (GLISA and SCIPP)

The free Neighborhoods at Risk online tool can help community leaders and adaptation professionals apply economic and climate data to reduce risk for vulnerable populations, but: 1) users may not immediately understand the tool’s full potential; and 2) those who may benefit from the tool may not be aware of its availability. In partnership with Adaptation International and two NOAA RISAs (GLISA and SCIPP), Headwaters Economics will create and distribute training resources that improve the accessibility and scalability of the existing Neighborhoods at Risk tool in 18 cities.

This project will make economic data and arguments more accessible to community leaders working on climate adaptation projects. Training resources will be developed for (1) community planners and leaders, (2) regional and national climate adaptation professionals, and (3) organizations that advocate for equitable climate action. The training resources will explain how community leaders can use the economic and climate data in Neighborhoods at Risk to support climate adaptation.

Recipient: GEOS Institute

Project Partners: Adaptation International, Azavea, NOAA, NEMAC, Fernleaf, Aspen Global Change Institute, American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP)

The Climate Resilience Strategy Database aims to address a significant gap in the Resilience Ecosystem. Neither professional practitioners nor local leaders working in communities are currently able to access up-to-date information regarding the effectiveness and tradeoffs of possible resilience strategies for the climate vulnerabilities they have identified. The lack of this information is slowing individual planning processes and inhibiting the ability of the larger field to share critically important information about what strategies are working, where different strategies may be appropriate, and the impacts of specific strategies on social equity and ecological systems. The Climate Resilience Strategies Database brings those strategies together, along with information about what should be considered with each strategy in terms of social equity, effects on ecosystems, and impact on mitigation efforts, in a free, searchable database that will be kept current over time by engagement with the Resilience Ecosystem.

Recipient: Mapping Action Collective

Project Partners: CAPA Strategies, Science Museum of Virginia, Boston Museum of Science, Collective of South Florida Cities, GroundWork New York (Yonkers), and the City of Honolulu’s Office of Climate Sustainability and Resilience

This grant supports two major initiatives. The first is the development of a web-based platform for conducting community science campaigns, which provides the essential elements for managing and organizing a scientific field campaign for towns and cities. The platform will include information materials (e.g. manuals and videos), guidelines for ordering relatively inexpensive campaign temperature equipment (e.g. thermocouple, mounting instructions, downloading data, etc.), and an online invitation system for enabling partners to engage volunteers (e.g. recruiting drivers, marking areas of interest, generating route maps, etc.), and templates for communications and promotion both before and after these single-day campaigns. These refined “do-it-yourself” campaigns will be hosted and championed by local lead organizers representing informal science learning centers, other NGO’s, and municipalities that are already invested in participatory, civics-to-action climate resilience programming, thereby leveraging cost-share funding and volunteer time in the process.

Read more about this project from our partners at NOAA

Recipient: Model Forest Policy Project

Project Partners: EcoAdapt, NOAA Climate Program Office, International City/County Management Association, Geos Institute

The rural counties and small towns of America manage the farms, forests, watersheds and fisheries that provide air, water, food and fiber for urban and rural people alike. However, rural jurisdictions and businesses face escalating risks from extreme weather events and the impacts of heat, storms, flood, drought, wildfire, and much more. The capacity to address these challenges is sometimes limited by a lack of resources, staff capacity, and technical expertise in rural areas. Unfortunately, most existing climate services are also urban-focused. These resources do not mesh with the uniquely rural need to address both small towns and large landscapes that include farms, forests, rangelands, deserts, and waterways. There is a real and growing need for capacity and services that address rural obstacles, geographic conditions, and conservative ideological influences.

The Resilient Rural America Project (RRAP) proposes to accelerate rural climate adaptation by strengthening the ability of adaptation professionals to meet the needs of underserved rural jurisdictions, organizations, and businesses. The proposed project will enable rural leaders to take action on resilience strategies that meet their distinct priorities in ways that are feasible with limited staff and resources. The project is using a co-production approach to work in partnership with rural leaders and adaptation practitioners to understand specific rural priorities and needs and co-produce a series of training modules that meet those needs by drawing from the strengths of the existing resilience ecosystem resources and by using rural-friendly delivery methods.

Recipient: EcoAdapt

Project Partners: The American Association of Adaptation Professionals

Decision makers from communities and organizations of all sizes represent the constituency and market for the climate service providers sector. These practitioners and local leaders need expertise and guidance as they seek to make climate-informed decisions. Yet, this rapidly growing field currently has no mechanism to help connect service providers with those in need of their services. Because the field does not have standard certification, practitioners who contract with service providers have no way to determine the degree to which services providers are experienced, capable, or competent. As a result, they may work with providers who may not be a good fit for their community or organization and at worst contribute to maladaptation or increased risk. The Registry addresses this challenge by gathering information about service providers that is useful to service seekers and by making that information accessible and user friendly.

Recipient: Headwaters Economics

Project Partners: Northeast Regional Climate Center, Cornell University, NOAA, Mapbox Community, Azavea, Inc., Urban Sustainability Directors Network, US Bureau of Land Management

Headwaters Economics developed the Neighborhoods at Risk web-based tool to help 18 Midwestern and Mid-Atlantic communities identify the location of socioeconomically at-risk populations who are especially vulnerable to extreme weather events. The tool was developed in close partnership with sustainability directors from each of the 18 cities and with guidance from the NOAA Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic RISA teams. It was originally published in December 2018 and later expanded to include 9 additional communities in the Great Lakes region.

Headwaters Economics will integrate two open-access tools, Neighborhoods at Risk and the Applied Climate Information System (ACIS). The ACIS, hosted by the Northeast Regional Climate Center, provides open and free access to the latest downscaled climate model projections as well as historical climate data. The NRCC ACIS was designed for integration into other tools, such as Neighborhoods at Risk, to reduce resources required to make climate information accessible to decision makers. This project will expand the Neighborhoods at Risk tool, making it available to every community and county in the nation.

Recipient: ICLEI

Project Partners: Azavea, Fernleaf

…integration of a Top Hazards analysis and visualization feature within the NOAA Climate Explorer, and ground-test the module with US partner communities to refine and revise the tool in order to ensure it is useful and relevant to potential users. This feature provides suggested hazards specific to a user’s location based on the 2014 National Climate Assessment findings for their geographic region.

Recipient: Future Earth

Project Partners: FernLeaf, World Resources Institute, Vizzuality

Local planners and decision-makers are facing tough questions in a changing climate. Should city officials update building codes to climate-proof infrastructure against storm surges from monster hurricanes like Maria or move to higher ground? Should farmers in drought-prone regions adopt more efficient irrigation systems or switch to climate-resilient seeds? A barrier to answering these questions is the lack of access to useful and timely climate data and information. Existing resources, such as the Climate Explorer and the Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness (PREP), have made strides in increasing the usability and accessibility of data for the resilience ecosystem.

The Climate Explorer has improved the accessibility of climate information in decision making by building several data visualization modules with historic and projected climate and high tide flooding data. The newly developed open-source PREPdata platform is designed to help users to find relevant data for climate adaptation and resilience planning. With support from CRF, Future Earth will improve user visualizations in Climate Explorer and incorporate them into PREPdata, allowing the modules to be included on PREPdata dashboards. This project will benefit the resilience ecosystem by increasing practitioner’s ability to incorporate and translate critical climate data into local decision making.

Recipient: The Model Forest Policy Program

Project Partners: International City/County Management Association, EcoAdapt, Geos Institute, NOAA

An impressive collaborative effort of the Model Forest Policy Program (MFPP), the International City/County Management Association (ICMA), the Geos Institute, EcoAdapt, and the NOAA Climate Program Office, this team will work to accelerate climate resilience action in small, rural communities by co-producing and beta-testing a rural climate resilience training module, building sustainable funding support for adaptation service providers, and catalyzing action for adaptation strategies in communities where climate resources and guidance remain scarce.

Recipient: EcoAdapt

Project Partners: American Society of Adaptation Professionals, Geos Institute, Adaptation Service Bureau

Managers and planners from communities and organizations of all sizes are in need of guidance as they seek to make climate-informed decisions. EcoAdapt and its partners are creating a new online open-access Registry that will help to connect local decision-makers with vetted climate services providers.The rapidly growing Resilience Ecosystem contains many accomplished service providers and adaptation resource organizations. This product will help decision-makers quickly find the expertise they need to plan for, implement and evaluate climate resilience actions in their communities. The Registry will promote a common understanding of good practice and create a new system of service provider accountability. While other efforts are underway to identify, map, and create better access to adaptation organizations, there are currently no means available to locate and connect individual service providers with those in need of their services. In an emergent field that lacks certification standards, the Registry will provide local leaders with an efficient way to contract with service providers with relevant experience and proven performance.

Recipient: American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP)

Project Partners: EcoAdapt, Georgetown Climate Center, UNC Asheville’s National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

To ensure a climate-resilient future, effective decision making is needed in every sector and at every scale. The foundation of effective decision making is actionable, relevant, and appropriate information. EcoAdapt’s Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange (CAKE), Georgetown Climate Center’s (GCC) Adaptation Clearinghouse, and the federal government’s Climate Resilience Toolkit (CRT) are the adaptation field’s key knowledge brokers. These web portals act as toolboxes for members of the Resilience Ecosystem by providing curated access to a wide range of resources and information.

This project aims to examine these three platforms to identify key similarities and differences, build collaboration, and develop a plan for platform interoperability. The key objectives of the project include (1) helping users recognize when to use which tool in the toolbox, and (2) preparing the field’s knowledge brokers for further integration and collaboration. Deliverables include enhanced site linkages and connections among the three platforms where overlap exists and identification of complementary content for possible cross-platform synthesis.

Recipient: Freshwater Future

Project Partners: Sky Island Alliance, Adaptation/Insight, EcoAdapt, American Society of Adaptation Professionals

By bringing the concept of decision analysis into the Resilience Ecosystem, this project will help to increase use of analytic tools and concepts for communities making decisions on climate adaptation strategies.The partnership will develop a series of case studies illustrating how the tools of decision analysis have been applied to climate-related decision making and implement two pilot trainings: one to guide city decision-makers and community members to evaluate tradeoffs and options to upgrade infrastructure and build resilience; and another to support a diverse team of stakeholders developing a climate-smart conservation plan for the desert Southwest.

Recipient: Climate Access

Project Partners: NOAA Climate Program Office, Bellwether Collaboratory, American Association of Adaptation Professionals, Science to Action Community

The Resilience Navigator is aimed at scaling adaptation/resilience services by developing a dynamic web-based landscape analysis tool for identifying key actors in the Resilience Ecosystem based on roles, functions, and relationships. The Navigator will allow service providers and end users to gain insights as to how skill sets and services fit together, provide a better understanding of what is happening on the ground, and to identify gaps and opportunities for implementing climate adaptation strategies in their communities. This effort will consolidate data from a landscape analysis and member surveys of service organizations and use this as the basis for the map that will update dynamically as other actors in the Resilience Ecosystem add themselves to the database via a publicly accessible web app. The project will establish a foundation for ongoing coordination among service providers as the organizations involved will determine how to better connect their assets together in the landscape so end users find it easier to navigate the adaptation/resilience field, will pilot a process for sharing proprietary information with each other, and using this data to foster collaboration.

Recipient: EcoAdapt


Support for a three-day workshop that will be co-hosted by NOAA, EcoAdapt, and CRF. The goal of the event, planned for January 2018, is to facilitate the forging of an “ecosystem” of public and private collaborators committed to sustaining and evolving science-based tools, information, and expertise that can help communities and businesses build resilience to climate change impacts and extreme events. Core elements of this meeting include identifying how to fill the gaps in the Resilience Ecosystem but, how to sustain those current resources upon which everyone already relies. Funds will be used to provide travel support for key participants, as well as staff time for organizers. NOAA has provided a $25,000 match to support the workshop.

Recipient: Science to Action Community


Support for the Science to Action Community (S2AC), a nascent network of networks and organizations from the public, private NGO and academic sectors that are working together to coordinate and support climate action, environmental protections, and the production and use of science. S2AC formed in early 2017 on the heels of a meeting of more than 50 organizational leaders from the nonprofit community, academic institutions, federal agencies, and many practitioner networks in Washington DC. The group has organized to meet the challenges posed by the new political environment in DC. Funds will be used to provide staff support focused on the coordination of ten standing committees; development of a long-term coordination plan and a communications plan for the (now 80-plus members in the) S2A Community; and organization of the S2A Community meeting at the National Adaptation Forum in May 2017.

*Resources Legacy Fund served as fiscal agent and provided a $25,000 match for CRF’s grant.

Recipient: GEOS Institute

Support for the Designing a Nation-wide Climate Adaptation Service Delivery System project, a collaborative effort involving more than a dozen institutions focused on increasing the visibility of, access to, and utilization of climate adaptation tools and resources for local and regional practitioners across the country. The Service Bureau collaboration is working to design and create an effective climate services delivery system to make existing and newly developed resources more visible, transparent, and usable. Funds will be distributed among a core group of organizational leaders who will take on key research and planning elements, and to provide travel and convening support for the working group which is comprised of representatives from nearly 30 organizations.

Recipient: University of Virginia Institute for Environmental Negotiation

Virginia’s coastal communities are also among the most vulnerable in the US to the impacts of sea-level rise. In fact, Hampton Roads is facing the highest rates of sea level rise along the entire east coast. These rival New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta as the country’s most at risk for the effects of coastal flooding. Unfortunately, as is the case elsewhere, it is the most disadvantaged Virginians who are most impacted and least equipped to plan for and respond to coastal hazards. The University of Virginia (UVA) and a consortium of partners including the Virginia Coastal Policy Center at William & Mary Law School and the Old Dominion University Climate Adaptation and Resilience Program have designed the RAFT: Resilience Adaptation Feasibility Tool and the RAFT Scorecard assessment, a project aimed at building the capacity of people and towns in Virginia’s coastal regions to understand and adapt to the impact of sea level rise. The RAFT Scorecard provides a comprehensive assessment of a locality’s current resilience to flooding and other coastal hazards, issues of social equity, and potential impacts to economic and social viability.

With support from the Climate Resilience Fund, UVA and its partners will conduct a RAFT Scorecard assessment of seven localities on Virginia’s Eastern Shore that are already vulnerable to flooding. Scorecard results will be shared with community leaders through participatory discussions around their own towns’ challenges for effective climate change adaptation. UVA will assist communities in creating and implementing Resilience Action Checklists that prioritize their greatest opportunities for increasing local resilience. Prioritized actions may range from increasing local environmental regulations, to applying nature-based solutions such as green infrastructure installations, and improved land and water management practices. The collaboration will also facilitate a regional planning meeting to bring participants from across Virginia’s Eastern Shore into a regional dialogue around shared challenges, resources, and opportunities for region-wide collaboration on climate adaptation and resilience.

Recipient: Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, Coastal Resilience Program

The Eastern Shore of Maryland is one of the nation’s most vulnerable regions to sea-level rise impacts (only a handful of regions, including south Florida and coastal Louisiana are considered more at-risk). Maryland’s coastal region has fewer resources available to address these vulnerabilities. Led by the climate resilience team at the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy (ESLC), The Eastern Shore Climate Adaptation Partnership has been established as a multi-jurisdictional collaborative workgroup to build local capacity for shared resilience priorities across the region.

Support from the Climate Resilience Fund will help the ESLC provide vulnerability analyses, planning tools, coordination, and collaborative learning opportunities to help communities prepare for climate impacts through science-driven resilience planning and nature-based adaptation solutions like open space plans, hazard mitigation plans, stormwater ordinances, and green infrastructure improvements. Over the next two years, ESLC will host facilitated “Game of Floods” simulations and participatory workshops to help planners and decision-makers to: 1) translate the sea-level rise science and modeling scenarios so that they can assess the impacts to their communities; 2) understand the range of possible flood mitigation and sea-level rise adaptation strategies available to them; and 3) identify effective strategies and policy changes for adoption in their communities.

Recipient: The Nature Conservancy, New Jersey Chapter

Current research shows that New Jersey is likely to experience additional sea-level rise between 3-6 feet by the end of this century. Sea-level rise is not the only threat to the region. Concurrent increases in the frequency and intensity of precipitation events will coincide with expected increases in storm surge, nuisance flooding, and coastal erosion. These impacts, in combination with human development patterns including a predisposition by coastal communities to harden shorelines, will combine to put New Jersey’s extensive and rich coastal habitats at risk. These coastal ecosystems – tidal wetlands, salt marshes and sand dunes – buffer communities from impacts of flooding and storm surge that can cause millions of dollars in damage to homes, businesses, and infrastructure.

With support from the Climate Resilience Fund, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) will work to transform management of the coastline by enabling and encouraging partner communities to integrate the use of nature-based solutions into community and state response to climate-related hazards. Through engagement with stakeholders and a broad range of partners in 25 local communities, TNC will use its Coastal Resilience Took Kit to help assess flood risk, identify solutions, inform climate resilience planning, and implement proof of concept projects to demonstrate how restoration of coastal wetland habitats can protect both human communities and wildlife while mitigating the impacts of sea-level rise. TNC will also create a “Small Grant Living Shorelines Fund” to provide financial incentives and technical assistance for municipalities implementing their own nature-based shoreline resilience projects.