Purpose
In this activity, you will explore, evaluate, and prioritize resilience strategies and actions that help you reach your community vision and goals and address the risks and vulnerabilities identified in Step 3.
Why?
You don’t have to start from scratch. Innovative, effective, and equitable resilience strategies and actions are being developed by communities across the state, country, and world. This broad list of seed strategies will give you a foundation to start from when thinking about which strategies will work best for your community. Do not be afraid to lean into this larger network instead of starting from scratch. Not all of the resilience strategies you identify will make the final cut. Evaluating your list of resilience strategies based on specific criteria will ensure that you are using a systematic approach to making recommendations for their integration into community plans and their implementation.
When?
Now that you understand your vulnerabilities and risks, you can start to develop strategies to address them. This process generally takes three to six weeks. It can take longer and ultimately depends on the size of your community, your planning budget, the availability of your advisory team members, and the number of strategies you have compiled.
Tips
- Consider all options. Remember, at this stage in the process, don’t make judgments about the feasibility, cost, or political implications of implementing certain resilience strategies/actions. That analysis will happen later. It is your responsibility as a planner to make sure that you have considered all available possibilities and that a diverse (and equitable) range of options are on the table.
- Take advantage of some foundational resources. For example, in climate change adaptation planning, you may identify ideas from the Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange, the Georgetown Climate Adaptation Clearinghouse, the Mountain West Climate Services Partnership, and the US Climate Resilience Toolkit. Organize these resilience actions in your library by objective as defined in Activity 1, or by vulnerability/risk.
- Facilitate a Community Workshop. This is a perfect activity to focus on during an advisory committee meeting and/or a community workshop. Determine how to best garner input from your community and/or advisory committee on the development of resilience strategies/actions to create innovative, locally-grounded, and relevant ideas.
- Match the scope of your planning efforts to the magnitude of projected change. For example, if your local economy is dependent on snow tourism and projections show significant reductions or changes to your snowpack over the coming decades, identifying opportunities that enhance the resilience of your local economy may be a priority.
How does my community do this?
- Gather existing community resilience strategies and actions. Collect and compile existing strategies and actions in a central repository (such as this Resilience Strategies Template in the workbook), organized by sector, shock or stressor, resilience goal, or objectives (as identified in Activity 1).
- A quick note on terminology: generally, the term “strategy” refers to a high-level overarching theme, and the term “action” refers to a more specific approach that falls underneath that theme. For example, in the La Plata County Resilience Framework, one of the four strategies identified was to “Identify and remove barriers to equity for all those in our community.” And underneath that overarching strategy, they developed several actions, including “Construct and execute an equity training curriculum for local and regional government, educators, non-profits, and the business community so that equity is a consideration in agency and organizational planning and programming.” Generally, the more specific the action, the easier it is to implement and measure success. Key questions to consider:
- What communities face similar challenges to yours and are already planning for and/or implementing resilience strategies and actions to address those challenges
- What is the best way to organize your resilience strategies and actions? By shock/stressor? By objective? By sector? By resilience goal?
- A quick note on terminology: generally, the term “strategy” refers to a high-level overarching theme, and the term “action” refers to a more specific approach that falls underneath that theme. For example, in the La Plata County Resilience Framework, one of the four strategies identified was to “Identify and remove barriers to equity for all those in our community.” And underneath that overarching strategy, they developed several actions, including “Construct and execute an equity training curriculum for local and regional government, educators, non-profits, and the business community so that equity is a consideration in agency and organizational planning and programming.” Generally, the more specific the action, the easier it is to implement and measure success. Key questions to consider:
- Gather existing local, regional, state, and national resilience actions. Continue to compile strategies and actions from communities across the state (and across the West) that are likely facing similar challenges to yours. For example, if your community is in the process of developing resilience strategies/actions to address the impacts of declining tourism due to decreasing snowpack, you may pull inspiration from communities across the region or state that are implementing innovative investments in tourism that don’t rely on snow. The action may not be exactly right for you as is but will provide a foundation for you to build on. Key questions include:
- Are there local or regional communities that inspire you in your resilience work?
- What communities are facing similar shocks and stressors? Have they learned any important lessons in their resilience or recovery work that would work in your community?
- How can you build on the great resilience work already happening across the state?
- Customize resilience actions specifically for your community. Use your local expertise and work with your core team and advisory groups (as appropriate) to refine and customize resilience actions for your community.
- Next, determine your approach to evaluating resilience actions. Depending on the capacity, funding, and time available to your team, determine your approach to evaluating resilience strategies/actions gathered in your library. You may only have the capacity, time, and funding to vote on or select a number of high-level resilience strategies with your core team. Yet, you may have the capacity and time to conduct a detailed evaluation qualitative analysis (e.g., scoring resilience actions based on high, medium, and low effectiveness). See the Evaluation Template in the workbook to help you with this work.
- Evaluate and prioritize your resilience strategies/actions. Using the approach agreed upon by your core team, complete the evaluation process to determine which actions are a potential fit for your community. A systematic approach to evaluation will help you 1) determine which actions are not relevant or are not a good fit for your community; 2) help you rank/rate your actions; and, 3) set you up to refine and prioritize actions. Key questions could also include:
- How much capacity, time, and funding does your team have to complete the evaluation process?
- How big is your draft resilience library? Does the size of your library help you determine whether or not you need to take a systematic approach to evaluate resilience strategies/actions?
- What evaluation process and methodology best fits your team and community’s current and future needs?
- Which selection criteria are most relevant to your community?
Following the evaluation process, discard the resilience strategies or actions that are not were not determined to be a good fit for your community at this time; however, keep in mind that some of these actions may become relevant if natural, social, or economic conditions change in your community in the future. Refine your library, and reorganize for ease of use. Once you have a semi-final list of customized resilience actions, prioritize which actions should be integrated into your plan(s). Take a look at the Final Action Template in the workbook for an example. For more information, reference pages 83-106 in the Climate Ready Communities Guide to Building Climate Resilience.
- Draft initial implementation details and indicators of success for your priority resilience actions. Once the resilience action prioritization process is complete, use the prioritized list to draft initial implementation details for those specific actions. You will refine these details in Step 5, Activity 4. Implementation details may include initial cost estimate ranges, time for implementation ranges, implementation leads, potential partners, indicators of success, opportunities for mainstreaming, etc. Defining (and ultimately tracking) indicators of success for each priority action will help your community measure progress as they are integrated. From there, start to think about what potential capacity building, training, or funding needs you may need to address as you move into the implementation process. Putting in the effort to define these details now will help to streamline your implementation process and create more effective actions.
Community Call Out: Eagle County, CO
In Eagle County, Colorado, county officials collected, compiled, and built off resilience strategies from across the county, region, state, and country for the development of the Eagle County Community Resilience Plan. This process helped in the formation of locally-grounded, strategic, and more effective resilience strategies that were then adopted as a formal part of their resilience framework. Strategies were developed in four main categories: health and wellness, the economy, natural resources, and infrastructure.
Community Call Out: Arvada, CO
As a part of the City of Arvada Resilience Strategy, the core planning team supported the process of defining what success looks like for each strategy, as well as specific actions that will be taken in the near future. Resilience strategies were identified from a variety of local, regional, state, and national sources, and helped create the foundation and framework for the core planning team to make them locally specific. In addition, they identified areas of “strategic alignment” in their framework as a means of building off of existing work already happening in the community.