Local municipal officials experience firsthand the impacts of climate change in their communities, facing rising sea levels, extreme heat, and extreme weather events that upend everyday life. While efforts to adapt and build resilience to climate impacts are already underway, many local governments continue to face severe funding and capacity constraints, hindering progress at the scale and pace demanded by the climate crisis. In light of these challenges, regional climate collaboratives have formed across the country to bring stakeholders together around a shared vision of climate resilience, coordinate adaptation efforts, and accelerate the transition from awareness to planning and action in their regions. Recognizing that landscape-level climate impacts require multisectoral collaboration, these collaboratives engage local jurisdictions and other key stakeholders such as universities, utilities, regional authorities and planning agencies, nonprofits, and local businesses.

The Regional Collaboratives Forum (RCF) harnesses the power of regional collaboration on a national scale by providing a space for regional climate collaboratives to engage in peer learning and build new partnerships.  RCF provides opportunities for collaboratives to share lessons and challenges from working towards regional climate resilience and engage in strategy discussions to facilitate more effective coordination both within their regions and with counterparts from across North America. Facilitated by the Georgetown Climate Center in partnership with CivicWell and the Institute for Sustainable Communities, the RCF meets every other month to discuss successes, challenges, and lessons learned from working at regional scales. 

Through these discussions, collaborative leaders can discover new approaches to funding, coordination, governance, and organization that can help them maximize their own effectiveness. RCF also provides opportunities to work together at a national scale to elevate regionalism in funding and policy discussions. Past calls have covered a wide range of topics including: 

• Mainstreaming Climate Change into Decisionmaking 
• Adaptation Pathways 
• The Economic Development & Climate Nexus 
• The Role of Regional Collaboratives in Promoting Equity 
• Performance Metrics for Collaboration and Adaptation Efforts 
• Partnering with the Business Community.

RCF Membership

RCF participants include municipal and county officials and others that support collaborative efforts through positions at state agencies, councils of government, academia, non-profit organizations, and foundations. Collectively, the RCF membership includes representatives from 25 climate collaboratives representing regions across the U.S. and in Canada.

If you are a member or representative of a regional climate collaborative (or an emerging regional network focused on climate change) and are interested in joining RCF calls, please reach out to Annie Bennett at bennett@georgetown.edu or Julia Kim at jkim@civicwell.org.