On July 21, AMWA submitted comments on a draft EPA report describing a tool to evaluate urban resilience. EPA’s draft report, Evaluating Urban Resilience to Climate Change, A Multi-Sector Approach, outlines a process for a city or community to measure its resilience to climate change. The report includes indicators of traits that may affect communities' resilience to climate change. An analysis of these indicators would assist decision-makers to concentrate community-wide resilience planning efforts on areas that most need it. The report describes case study results from Washington, D.C. and Worcester, Mass., two cities that tested the approach.
AMWA’s letter provides recommendations for improving some of the indicators used in the report. It also urges EPA to release the report as an interactive web-based tool, to maximize its effectiveness for being used by cities to assess climate resilience across many sectors.