On October 25, 2022, NOAA and partners released Implementing the Steps to Resilience: A Practitioner’s Guide, a handbook for national climate resilience.
The resource is designed to help climate adaptation practitioners work with local governments and community organizations to incorporate climate risk and equity into their long-term decision making.
With this user-friendly guide, resilience and adaptation professionals can add a significant new resource to their toolbox to implement the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit’s Steps to Resilience.
“This guide is a critical step towards scaling up resilience in every U.S. community,” said Rick Spinrad, Ph.D., NOAA administrator. “Building a Climate-Ready Nation means training a large national workforce of adaptation and resilience practitioners.”
In addition to the practitioner’s guide, NOAA and partners have created four other equity-centered guides to adaptation and resilience planning.
Online resources accompany the text, so practitioners may use similar methods and compare their progress toward climate resilience.
All of the guides are available free in the NOAA Institutional Repository:
- Ready-to-Fund Resilience supports practitioners’ work within the climate resilience funding and finance system.
- Centering Equity in Climate Resilience Planning and Action: a Practitioner’s Guide recommends equity principles to apply during adaptation and resilience planning.
- Moving from Faith-based to Tested Adaptation Process and Approach: How Will We Know We’re Adapting? emphasizes evaluation and measurement of adaptation practices.
- Incorporating Nature-based Solutions into Community Climate Adaptation Planning uses the “Steps to Resilience” framework to explore nature-based adaptation.
NOAA invested about $250,000 on Implementing the Steps to Resilience and co-funded the other four guides along with the Climate Resilience Fund, which matched federal dollars 1:1 with those of private philanthropies.
All five resources are being highlighted at the 5th National Adaptation Forum, which is taking place in Baltimore from October 25 to 27, 2022. The forum, a biennial event, convenes about 800 adaptation practitioners from across the nation to share knowledge, innovate, network and build relationships between government, academic, commercial and non-governmental groups.
During this year’s Forum, NOAA has an exhibit booth, #300, co-sponsored by the Climate Program Office, National Marine Fisheries Service, National Ocean Service, and the Sea Grant Program. Here, attendees may learn more about NOAA’s adaptation science and services.
In addition to formal training sessions, facilitated presentations by practitioners and other professional development, the forum will provide an environment for adaptation practitioners to learn more about climate-smart practices and share their work with others.
All images courtesy of NOAA.