Helping Communities Adapt to Climate Change
Even if society stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the impacts of past and current emissions would be felt for decades. That’s why the Georgetown Climate Center is working with state and local policymakers to plan for flooding in coastal communities, to address water shortages in already dry regions of the country, and to offset the public health dangers related to climate change.
The Georgetown Climate Center provides states and local governments with best-practice models, legal analysis, policy work, and legislative tracking, and seeks to maximize the federal, state, regional, and local collaborations that are needed to implement new approaches to adaptation.
Learn more about the Center’s work on adaptation.
News and Updates
This brief reviews three approaches that communities are pursuing to adapt to climate change:
- New Mexico's Active Water Resource Management program, which put rules into place that allow for temporary water use changes in real time in case of drought.
- The Water Utility Climate Alliance (WUCA), which was founded by water managers concerned by a gap in climate assessment and adaptation science needed to support their decisions.
- Colorado's Joint Front Range Climate Change Vulnerability Study, which brings together the state and water utilities to assess climate change's impact on local water availability.
In a story featured on the Huffington Post, writer John Carey and the Climate Center's Vicki Arroyo take on the climate deniers and discuss the impact that climate change is already having on the world around us, affecting everything from the cherry blossoms in D.C. to flooding and agriculture in cities and states across the U.S.
The sobering reality is that climate change is no longer abstract or theoretical, a threat to distant polar bears or tiny low-lying Pacific Islands. Instead, it means flooded Nashville basements and Iowa cities, withered crops in Oklahoma and new cases of Lyme disease from the northward spread of disease-bearing ticks. (Huffington Post)
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In January, Hawaii State Representative Cynthia Thielen introduced a bill to the state legislature proposing that state and county planning and permitting departments begin preparing for a 1-foot-by-2050 sea-level rise. The planning benchmark was also recently recommended by the University of Hawaii's Center for Island Climate Adaptation and Policy (“ICAP”) in its recently released paper, Sea-Level Rise and Coastal Land Use in in Hawai‘i: A Policy Tool Kit for State and Local Governments.
ICAP's paper was an adaptation of the Georgetown Climate Center’s...
While U.S. legislation to combat climate change remains stalled, this story highlights and recognizes some of the good adaptation work happening in states and cities throughout the country.
"Although no one has tallied exact numbers, hundreds of communities and agencies are reacting to increasingly severe weather…Vermont, reeling from unprecedented damage from Hurricane Irene, plans to rebuild stronger and better. 'Before, we were thoughtfully changing our codes and standards to make our infrastructure more resilient to changing weather...
The Georgetown Climate Center recently released two new reports to help communities adapt to climate change.
"Adaptation Tool Kit: Sea-Level Rise and Coastal Land Use" explores 18 different land use tools that communities can use to prepare for rising sea levels and the flooding that will result from climate change.
"Adaptation Case Studies in the Western United States" examines water shortages in the West and the protection of an important ground-dwelling bird: the greater sage grouse. ...
The Georgetown Climate Center has launched the Adaptation Clearinghouse, a new online tool and networking site that seeks to help communities adapt to climate change.
Facing extreme storms, flooding, drought, and water shortages, state and local policymakers are responding now to the impacts of climate change and are being forced to rethink planning for everything from roadway design and location to building standards to development along our...
The report, completed with assistance from the Georgetown Climate Center and other partners, contains important recommendations for developing resilience in the face of the challenges posed by a changing climate.
Given issues like water shortages that are already affecting much of the West, Governors recognized the need for collaboration in 2009 when the WGA charged a work group to develop the report and committed to adopting policies that support the integration of adaptation science throughout the region.
The 2009 resolution, “Supporting the Integration of Climate Change Adaptation Science in the West”, also identified three specific goals for further discussion, which...
