Resilience Dialogues

Community Lead

United States

The Resilience Dialogues is a public-private collaboration that works to build climate-resilient communities through facilitated dialogues among scientists, practitioners, and community leaders. Communities leave the Resilience Dialogues with a synthesis report that summarizes the key vulnerabilities, opportunities and resources for climate resilience planning identified.

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The challenge

Communities facing climate variability and change

Communities of all types – towns, cities, tribal nations, regional compacts, and more – face risks from climate variability and change, including changing patterns of extreme weather events, shifting growing seasons, more river and coastal flooding, less available water, and greater exposure to wildfires. They want and need to learn how to reduce these risks and build community resilience – to prepare for and recover from these stresses, minimize disruptions to daily life, and even reorganize to thrive in the face of changing conditions. A wealth of scientific information, data, and tools exists that could help manage these risks and integrate climate variability and change into a broad range of planning, engagement, and decision-making activities. However, many communities are often uncertain how to begin, what this information means for them, and where to turn for trustworthy advice. Smaller, isolated, or historically underserved communities especially want personalized technical assistance and to connect with experts who could help them understand their vulnerabilities and what future resilience might look like where they live.

The Results

Long-term resilience through facilitated dialogue

To help meet this growing need, the Resilience Dialogues uses a professionally facilitated, online process to connect community leaders to a network of vetted national experts and helps them work together to understand risks and lay the groundwork for long-term resilience. These online discussions can clarify local risks and opportunities, share strategies that have worked in other communities, identify the most relevant and useful data, tools, and networks, and build shared commitment to future plans and actions.

Communities leave the Resilience Dialogues with a synthesis report that summarizes the key vulnerabilities, opportunities and resources for climate resilience planning identified. In addition, local governments develop:

A set of well-articulated questions about their community’s vulnerabilities and threats to address in assessment and planning effort
An expert-vetted, evidence-based, community-specific list of climate vulnerabilities and opportunities that can be used to anchor resilience and adaptation planning
Connections to a large and vetted network of climate science, adaptation, and resilience experts
A community-centered, expert-reviewed compilation of tools and resources that can facilitate next steps toward the development of holistic resilience plans (i.e. of all the tools, resources and datasets out there, which are most appropriate for addressing your community’s questions, opportunities, and vulnerabilities)
Strategies for to engaging more of the community in resilience planning
A set of next steps for resilience planning, along with a list of potential partners for each of those steps.