Team members
Melissa Stults, Sara Meerow, Matthew Bishop, Noah Allington Partners: Beth Gibbons, Jessica Hitt, Sascha Petersen, Sierra Cameron Woodruff
Adviser
Rosina Bierbaum
Project Summary
Climate change is the single greatest threat to society and our quest to create more sustainable communities. As the impacts of a changing climate grow more acute, eroding existing sustainability gains and hampering our ability to meet future sustainability goals, the need to prepare or adapt to these impacts is becoming essential. With the initial seed funding, we convened 16 individuals, comprising a diverse group of stakeholders for an all-day workshop. Three pre-workshop surveys were created to help structure the face-to-face convening.
The workshop dove more deeply into identifying tools currently used by local government stakeholders to select adaptation strategies, assessing how well these tools meet local government needs, and exploring opportunities to combine and augment existing tools. The discussion established that existing tools do not fulfill local governments’ need for strategy identification and selection in a number of significant ways: the existing tool landscape is overwhelming and extremely challenging to navigate; existing resources are not well curated, easily accessible, or peer-reviewed; and existing resources often do not have the specific types of information that local governments are looking for.
The service providers in attendance discussed how their individual tools could be refined to meet existing user needs as well as how their tools could complement one another through a shared platform. the technical experts were very encouraging about the feasibility of merging existing tools and creating programming methods to coordinate the integration of information from the multiple adaptation strategy databases/tools that currently exist.