Developing a community plan or nature-based project that helps build community resilience with significant stakeholder input can help to ensure that any resulting plan or project is tailored specifically to a community’s individual strengths, vulnerabilities, and assets. While these plans should be community-led and centered, policymakers can still assist in helping to create general frameworks upon which more neighborhood-specific plans can be based.
Across the United States, there is an overarching lack of trust in a government’s ability to implement resilience projects. In the past, many approaches to facilitate community resilience have not necessarily taken a more holistic approach to plan development in viewing the social, economic, and historical challenges that make each community unique.See footnote 1 Even in instances where a community has been consulted, residents may not be involved in the implementation of those laws, plans, policies, and projects. To build and maintain trust with residents, policymakers should encourage continued transparency and make concerted efforts at engaging with the community, including when developing and updating laws, plans, programs, and projects that “greaux” or grow local resilience through open space and nature-based solutions. In an effort to encourage this practice and institutionalize community engagement in planning and policymaking efforts, public participation laws can be amended or construed more widely to promote opportunities for community engagement (e.g., creating advisory boards staffed by community leaders, developing and tracking community engagement metrics).
This part outlines four types of actions regional and local policymakers can take to ensure that laws, plans, policies, and projects around open space and nature-based solutions are designed with significant and meaningful community engagement. These four steps are:
While there are some overlapping considerations for each of these entry points into nature-based processes, it is important to call out each one separately because planning, land use and zoning, and projects can occur together or in distinct tracks. Ideally, cumulative, sequential processes — from planning to land use and zoning to project implementation — can help build on and reinforce one another to maximize alignment. In contrast, the fourth type of action related to public participation laws and policies is an overarching action that cuts across all of the other three. Regardless of the approach, however, each category requires equitable engagement with the community that is iterative and long-term.
These four actions are not meant to be inclusive of any and all actions a policymaker can make to ensure that resilience processes for nature-based solutions are community-centered. Instead, they should be viewed as some initial and priority ways that policymakers can evaluate to start to build more robust decisionmaking frameworks. This is in contrast to providing “how-to” steps to construct such a framework. For a more robust discussion on the importance of community engagement in the creation of plans, the development of land-use and zoning laws and land-use policies, the implementation of projects, and the strengthening of regional and local public participation laws and policies more generally, see Objective 5.1. In contrast to that objective, this part of the Regional Vision will discuss these four approaches more narrowly, in the context of facilitating stronger community resilience to flooding and extreme weather events.
Plans can set a comprehensive framework that guides how laws, policies, and projects are implemented. Plans go by many names and take a variety of forms. They are developed at different and multiple levels of government and are prepared on multiple geographic scales. Some are legally required and others are out-of-cycle or discretionary.
![]() |
Specific to this objective, parishes and municipalities can work with communities to prioritize open space and nature-based considerations in different ways. This can include collaborating with the community in the design of jurisdiction-wide local comprehensive plans or in the development of more discrete plans focused on preserving and increasing the amount of green space in a given neighborhood. Regardless of the type of plan, all planning documents should be created in collaboration with impacted residents. Within Region Seven alone, neighborhoods and communities differ in terms of population, the socioeconomic status of residents, access to resources, cultural history, community assets, climate vulnerabilities, and more. By centering community engagement in these processes, policymakers and planners can learn about the strengths, vulnerabilities, and existing assets and initiatives that the community has, and tailor specific initiatives to address these unique characteristics. In doing so, any resulting plan will better address the unique challenges each community faces.
One action policymakers can take to help ensure that community voices are heard in the creation of a plan is to host expansive community workshops with diverse stakeholders to better understand what types of planning and projects will best benefit specific neighborhoods. For example, in Miami-Dade County, the creation of the Sea Level Rise Strategy involved hosting community events, workshops, presentations, online surveys, and conferences.See footnote 2 By the end of the design process, the County’s Office of Resilience had heard from almost 400 stakeholders, whose input helped to prioritize the adaptive and resilience strategies that were ultimately recommended in the final strategy.
Facilitating community-led planning processes means involving community members early and often in the development and implementation of any related plan. Along with hosting events (both online and in-person), policymakers and planners can also create specific outreach strategies and ensure they are accompanied by engagement metrics, which can measure outreach and resilience plan success. This can help parishes and municipalities better streamline and institutionalize community engagement in agency or policymaking actions. Kresge Foundation’s Community-Driven Climate Resilience Planning: A Framework offers examples of outreach actions policymakers can take when developing an adaptation or resilience plan and “interventions” or metrics that can keep the goals included in the plans “on track.”
Creating and updating local land-use and/or zoning ordinances can be used to increase nature-based solutions in a community. Local governments have the primary authority to regulate land uses in their communities through zoning and floodplain ordinances. Land use is connected to, but also distinct from zoning. Land use contemplates the economic and cultural “human use of land” and the different uses of public and private land. It also directly affects land cover pertaining to impervious and green surfaces, which can, in turn, affect flooding and stormwater — ultimately affecting a community’s resilience. Essentially, land use planning not only determines where a community allows or does not allow development, but also what communities can choose to cover the land with. Conversely, land-use and zoning ordinances provide the legal framework that governs the use and development of land in a municipality according to different districts based on the uses that are permitted (e.g., residential, commercial, industrial). The use of land use and zoning as specific tools to expand the promulgation of nature-based solutions and projects will be discussed in Objective 1.2. This part of the Regional Strategy pertains to how community engagement should be integrated into land use and zoning discussions.
Because of historical land-use and planning practices, some communities are more heavily impacted by the effects of industrial activities, like decreased air quality and more smog than others. These places typically also have less access to green, open spaces and nature-based projects and solutions. Community members are often the best sources to hear from regarding a first-hand basis about the effects that these historical practices have had on their neighborhoods. Land-use and zoning designations can be used to promote nature-based solutions, which can help to mitigate the impacts of poor air quality and increase access to open spaces. Thus, when amending land-use and zoning practices to take these inequities into account and create more resilient, green neighborhoods, community stakeholders' voices should be heard.
For example, Community-Driven Climate Resilience Planning: A Framework spotlights the work done by the Center for Earth, Energy, and Democracy (CEED) in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the process of rezoning certain areas of the City, CEED promoted the use of a community-based tool — the Twin Cities Environmental Justice Mapping Tool — which works to incorporate “hard data to the experiences of impacted communities” pertaining to air quality, land use, and more.See footnote 3 As a result of CEED’s recommendation that Minneapolis planners use community-driven data and voices in this process, the city ultimately committed to rezoning several environmental justice communities as “green zones.” “Green zoning” created a new designation for these neighborhoods that now specifically targets them for new green infrastructure projects and programs. This case study emphasizes the impact that community engagement and community-driven data can have on amending land use and zoning laws and plans, especially in those neighborhoods that typically have less access to green spaces and have to deal with reduced air quality.
There are several different types of nature-based projects or programs that can be implemented or installed within a community that can help drive community resilience. Examples and scales can vary from planting a few trees in a small area within a community to help with stormwater filtration to restoring acres of land back to their natural state to offer ecosystem services and mitigate flood impacts.
Because a community experiences impacts from flooding and extreme weather events first-hand, the people that live in these areas are often the most familiar with what their neighborhood needs to become more resilient. Therefore, in order to determine what type of nature-based project or program can best benefit a community and improve resilience, it is vital that neighborhood stakeholders are consulted early and often in a project’s design and implementation process. Educating communities on what types of stormwater and green infrastructure projects can help with creating community resilience is extremely important, and is discussed in Objective 5.1. Nature-based projects that involve heavy community engagement throughout the process are oftentimes the most successful in helping a community become more resilient.
For example, in the City of North Miami, a previously vacant lot (to be discussed further in Objective 1.3) was redeveloped to create the Good Neighbor Stormwater Park: an open space available for recreation that doubles as stormwater detention to help with local flood prevention. From the inception of the project, community engagement was a priority for project planners. Community outreach actions included hosting convenings (including public or individual, one-on-one meetings) in a variety of languages to help ensure that a wider variety of stakeholders would have the opportunity to be heard. After an extensive engagement process, the resulting design was extremely community-friendly, and incorporated a variety of recreational opportunities the community members had prioritized throughout the planning process — while also providing flood mitigation benefits.
On a larger, neighborhood-wide scale, the City of New Orleans worked extensively with the community in the design and implementation of the Gentilly Resilience District and the individual green infrastructure and nature-based programs that make up the project as a whole. Community engagement activities included presentations and workshops held by the city to determine what problems the Gentilly community faced due to flooding, options on how these problems could be addressed, and the benefits that nature-based solutions like water gardens and blue/green corridors projects could have for the community. Throughout these meetings, stakeholders were encouraged to offer insights on the unique characteristics of their community and what green infrastructure projects and amenities they would like to see prioritized by the city. In implementing many of the Gentilly Resilience District programs, community outreach directly impacted what types of green infrastructure were introduced into the community.
In both instances, these types and levels of extensive engagement made specific projects of the Gentilly Resilience District (like the Mirabeau Water Garden and the improvements to the Pontilly Neighborhood stormwater network) and the Good Neighbor Stormwater Park more successful in helping to make these communities more resilient.
From a more generalized standpoint, one way to help ensure that a resilience framework is centered and directed by affected communities is to legally strengthen public participation laws so that policymakers are required to meaningfully collaborate with residents in the development of climate resilience plans or projects. Relating to community resilience and nature-based projects and programs specifically, potential options include:
By strengthening public participation laws and policies at a local level, decisionmakers can help increase opportunities for meaningful and equitable collaboration with a community in developing a plan, law, policy, or project that addresses a community’s adaptive capacity and resilience. To meaningfully reflect community ideals and needs, this type of public participation will need to be particularly robust, and may even need to involve compensating residents for their time, ensuring that stakeholder groups are representative of the community, etc. For more information generally on how to strengthen public participation and engagement laws (without a specific focus on resilience), see Objective 5.1.
When developing or amending a resilience plan, policy, or project with an emphasis on community engagement, decisionmakers may consider the following crosscutting considerations and practice tips that apply to each of the above recommendations:
These tips are based on priority implementation best practices and considerations most relevant to this specific objective and do not present an exhaustive list for regional and local planners and policymakers. In addition to this objective, decisionmakers should, at a minimum, also refer to Goal Five for crosscutting considerations and practice tips including structuring equitable and inclusive community engagement processes and evaluating opportunities to build public-private-nonprofit-community partnerships.
It is important to acknowledge that every jurisdiction will be starting from a different place and have a unique local context and needs, among other factors. Therefore, these considerations and practice tips could be adopted individually, collectively, or not at all. It will be up to policymakers to work directly with their communities and other key stakeholders and partners to assess and determine potential tools and approaches to implement this goal and objective.
The summaries below highlight resources and case studies available in Georgetown Climate Center’s Adaptation Clearinghouse that are relevant to this objective. They illustrate how many of the above benefits, practice tips, and planning, legal, and policy tools were or are being evaluated and used in practice in different jurisdictions. To learn more and navigate to the Adaptation Clearinghouse, click on the “View Resource” buttons.
Endnotes:
1. Tiffany Ganthier, Georgetown Climate Ctr., Community-Driven Engagement Processes, Equitable Adaptation Legal & Pol’y Toolkit (2020), View Source. | Back to contentBack to content
2. Arcadis, Miami-Dade County Sea Level Rise Strategy (2021), available at View Source. | Back to contentBack to content
3. Kresge, Community-Driven Climate Resilience Planning: A Framework (2022), available at View Source. | Back to contentBack to content
4. Tiffany Gantheir, Community-Driven Engagement Processes, in Equitable Adaptation Legal & Policy Toolkit (2020). Back to contentBack to content
Read Previous Section Read Next Section
Back to top