On October 31, the White House Council on Climate Preparedness released a report highlighting the work of the Obama Administration and federal agencies over the past eight years to support climate resilience. The Council on Climate Preparedness, chaired by the White House, comprises over 25 federal agencies. The report, Opportunities to Enhance the Nation’s Resilience to Climate Change, chronicles the key presidential Executive Orders federal agency efforts and other federal efforts that the Obama Administration has undertaken to support resilience of local communities.
The report lists seventeen opportunities for the federal government to guide and build climate resilience across the U.S. Each opportunity is guided by four principles:
- Climate resilience should incorporate meaningful community engagement, fair and equitable outcomes and targeted investments for communities often overlooked;
- Climate resilience should be coordinated among multiple stakeholders, including all levels of government, academic institutions, companies and nonprofits;
- Climate resilience should be mainstreamed into everyday decision making; and
- Climate resilience should be a factor in fiscally responsible investments.
The opportunities are grouped within three themes:
- Advancing and applying science-based information, technologies and tools to address climate risk – such as enhancing the usability of climate tools, supporting cross-sector collaboration to advance research and evaluating progress and performance of resilience investments;
- Integrating climate resilience into federal agency missions, operations and culture – such as conserving and managing ecosystems to enhance resilience, strengthening coordination across federal agencies and enhancing federal workforce capacity through training; and
- Supporting community efforts to enhance climate resilience – such as strengthening place-based approaches to climate resilience, meaningfully engaging communities, investing in local leaders and encouraging comprehensive preparedness.
The report provides several examples of federal and local climate resilience initiatives. While water utility examples are not specifically mentioned in the report, federal agency tools and programs that can support utility resilience are noted, including the Climate Resilience Toolkit, EPA’s CREAT tool and the opportunity for co-production of knowledge via the Bureau of Reclamation’s Basin Studies Program. The report also mentions that the government is investing in research in water conservation and reuse technologies.
One of the opportunities identified in the report is working with stakeholders to enhance the usability of climate information. In conjunction with the report’s release, the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy also announced the beta version of the Resilience Dialogues collaboration. The online collaboration tool and service, supported by a diverse set of private, governmental, academic and nonprofit collaborators will enable community leaders to engage in tailored discussions with scientists, practitioners and other subject-matter experts. The Dialogues platform is a public-private partnership coordinated by the U.S. Global Change Research Program and the American Geophysical Union’s Thriving Earth Exchange with support from the Kresge Foundation.
Another opportunity identified in the report is encouraging preparedness. In support of this goal, the White House also announced a coalition of 97 academic centers, colleges, universities and associations committing to educate the next generation of design professionals to design and build for extreme weather events and climate impacts.