Activity 2: Gather Information About Future Changes to Your Community

Purpose

In this activity, you will use reputable and credible local, regional, state, or national models, tools, and information sources to identify projected changes to your community including historic and current census data, projections for future changes to the climate, and potential stressors.

Why?

Climate change, development, changing demographics, changing technology, shifting economies, and globalization impact all of our communities in important ways. To deal with both ongoing and future processes of change, communities must be aware of broader processes at play that may come to shape their daily life and well-being. This is part of understanding community risk (not just current risk, but also future risk) and can support pre-disaster recovery planning (navigate to Step 4 Activity 4 for more information) and other planning processes. Understanding risk also presents an opportunity to understand and develop strategies to address that risk.

When?

As part of the initial data-gathering efforts. This process should generally take several weeks.

How does my community do this?

1. Identify key social, demographic, and other important community trends. Determining how your community is changing - whether it is growing, shrinking, aging, or becoming more diverse - plays a central role in its ability to deal with changing environmental, economic, and social conditions. Be sure to visit the Community Resilience Organizations’ Community Resilience Assessments and Actions Guide to support this activity. In addition, resources with the State Demographer’s office, as well as work by the Colorado Water Conservation Board can be helpful, as both work to project current trends relating to population growth and resource demands at the local, county, regional, and state levels.
2. Integrate the best available information on environmental change, including climate change. Examples include the Colorado Climate Plan, Western Water Assessment, and other research. Reach out to local universities, the CRO, the Western Water Assessment (one of NOAA’s Regionally Integrated Sciences and Assessment Centers), or other partners for help gathering and summarizing this information if needed.
3. Identify potential economic or technological changes and their impacts. Look to work with researchers, entrepreneurs, or others within the state’s university community to understand how different economic factors (for example, water markets) and technologies (such as agrovoltaics) may affect or play a role in your community’s future.

Community Call Out: Northwest Colorado Council of Governments 

In 2018, the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments - a coalition of county and municipal governments located in Jackson, Grand, Eagle, Summit, and Pitkin Counties - commissioned the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization to conduct a study of the region’s future risks and exposures under several climate change scenarios, titled Climate Change in the Headwaters. Because these counties all rely heavily upon winter snowpack and watershed function for their economies and local ecosystems, it focused on water and snow impacts. Using a wide array of established state and national climate projection information, including climate change projections from the Western Water Assessment and the University of Colorado, they were able to identify: a) What has happened; b) What could happen; and, c) What is at stake across several key dimensions of the regions, such as annual snowpack, water shortages, and the Colorado River Compact, winter recreational impacts, shifts in annual tourism patterns, and impacts to water quality. By utilizing previous workshops and interview reports from towns and cities in their region, they were able to further ground the high-level climate information they gathered in examples from local livelihoods and experiences.