Purpose
In this activity, you will track progress, review effectiveness, and make changes to your approach as necessary.
Why?
Monitoring the implementation (pages 65-70) of your resilience actions will help identify if and how a resilience action (and strategy) is continuing to meet your community’s needs. As conditions change, so will the effectiveness of different actions. Evaluating the effectiveness of your resilience actions helps determine what impact - both desired and undesired, anticipated and unanticipated - have occurred as a result of your work.
When?
Monitoring is ongoing and dependent on the needs of the various actions. In general, an annual assessment or progress report is the standard acceptable frequency for pre-disaster and climate adaptation planning. If a disaster occurs, you may need to more immediately evaluate the actions you are currently taking and either adjust current efforts or initiate the implementation of new actions. State legislation or grant requirements may also dictate the frequency of evaluation of your resilience actions.
Tips
- Allocate the appropriate resources. Tracking resilience strategies takes dedicated staff time, funding, and strategic coordination that should be planned for from the beginning of the implementation process.
- Leverage existing work. Monitoring is more effective and efficient when using an indicator that is already collected as part of day-to-day operations. This reduces the additional staff time and budget necessary to monitor the impacts.
How does my community do this?
- Define monitoring details. Determine who will be designated as the responsible party for carrying out the monitoring of specific resilience strategies and actions (this should likely be the implementation lead). In many cases, this will also require the designation of a dedicated funding source. The responsible party can be a municipal department, regional entity, or a community group. Once the responsible party is determined, make sure the team is clear how tracking resilience actions will be carried out and recorded. Be sure to establish how often your team will convene. Additional information can be found using the USDN Climate Adaptation Framework and Indicator Evaluation.
- Monitor and track the implementation of actions. The following are questions that you should consider when tracking your progress:
- Could annual reporting be built into existing reporting, budgets, or other frameworks that your community already uses?
- How many actions have already been undertaken by various departments?
- How have you engaged stakeholders in the development and implementation of your actions? Are there additional areas in which this needs to happen?
- Are community partnerships in place to enable robust decision making concerning resilience planning?
- To what extent have you increased the general and technical capacity of your community to prepare for current and future shocks and stressors?
- How have drivers or constraints changed? Are there new opportunities available that might aid the implementation of your community’s actions now and in the future?
- Conduct community outreach to seek input and feedback. This will provide you an opportunity to check in with your community to determine if the actions you are taking are yielding the benefits and impacts you envisioned.
Review the effectiveness of strategies and actions being implemented and adjust as needed. When evaluating for effectiveness, be sure to continually reference the criteria and metrics you developed in Step 5 Activity 4. During the review, it is important to consider the following questions:
- Did the action/strategy get implemented as planned? If not, why?
- If the action/strategy was not implemented but is still relevant, how can the Implementation Team move it to implementation?
- If the action/strategy has been implemented, how effective is it? If it is less effective than planned, can any adjustments be made? If it is successful, can the strategy be implemented more widely?
- Were there factors beyond your control, such as an economic downturn, that could have affected your outcomes?
- How have the conditions in your community changed since implementation started?
- How effective have your actions/strategies been in achieving your community’s resilience vision and goals?
- How has awareness about key resilience issues and the projected impacts of your plan(s) on your community increased as a result of your efforts?
If you find that the indicator your team selected or the data collection method is not sufficient to provide you with the information you need to evaluate your actions, then make sure to adjust these indicators or monitoring strategy as necessary. For example, you may need to modify the frequency at which you collect data, which may be due to staffing/budget constraints or a determination that data needs to be collected more or less frequently. You may need to adjust the indicator itself to something that is possibly more feasible to collect or better represents the impact you are trying to measure.
- Assess new data and information and adjust. Data to support resilience-focused decision-making is continuously evolving and improving, and adaptability and flexibility are key pillars of any resilient community. Resilience planning is an ongoing and iterative process, and the conditions under which you started planning will continue to change in the future. As environmental, economic, social, and political conditions change, the research your team conducted earlier in this process may need to be updated. As you learn new information about changes in your community and the effectiveness of your resilience work, you will likely need to adjust your approach to your resilience work and specific strategies.