The Keweenaw Bay Indian Community is concerned with how the impacts from climate change and coastal hazards may disrupt Anishinaabe culture. The community is already being impacted by coastal hazards such as flooding, erosion, legacy mine waste, and extreme temperatures. Dione Price, an environmental specialist, and Rachel Pressley, a regional planner, worked together on the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community’s plan.
Using funding from NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management, the Virginia Coastal Zone Management Program began working with individuals from county agencies who work toward protecting coastal resources. The group decided to start promoting ecotourism as a way to bring in additional revenue, rather than risking the asset be lost to development in the future.
As part of an upper-level seminar in the Department of Geography and Geosciences. and under the leadership of their professor, Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux, Ph.D., the students worked in collaboration with town, state, and federal agencies this past fall to come up with a plan to aid Underhill in natural-hazard mitigation in the face of our changing climate. With environmental challenges such as extreme drought, destructive flooding, and massive storms becoming more frequent, this type of class couldn’t be timelier.
Mackenzie Todd, a coastal resilience specialist with the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management, is leading up the North Carolina Resilient Coastal Communities Program, which focuses on facilitating community-led resilience planning and project identification. The program is providing financial grants and technical assistance to communities to support planning and implementation.
Climate change represents a significant challenge for California. Climate scientists have found that are becoming more frequent, more intense, and longer-lasting, as well as exhibiting higher nighttime temperatures and humidity—particularly in inland urban areas. Periods of sustained high temperatures and extreme weather readings will have the most direct impact on the peak demand forecast, leading to more frequent scarcity condition events when electricity supply and demand becomes severely imbalanced.
In 2019, city leaders in Fayetteville, NC, set out on an ambitious $13M Watershed Master Plan program to better understand the severity of city-wide flooding and proactively develop flood mitigation projects. Leaders understood that a comprehensive evaluation would support resiliency by providing a pool of prioritized projects for both short- and long-term implementation. This evaluation would stretch resources equitably across the city, provide opportunities to identify creative regional-scale projects, and ensure inter-governmental and cross-departmental collaborations.
Natural resources planning activities are constantly changing to accommodate new challenges, and it is becoming increasingly important that conservation and land management activities intentionally consider a changing and uncertain climate. This Quick Guide to Adaptation Planning for Natural Resources Professionals provides a starting point to help design and implement adaptation actions in natural resource planning work, with a focus on the project level.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is the largest investment in climate resilience in U.S. history. The $1.2 trillion in funding will create transformative opportunities for local governments that own and maintain most of the nation’s infrastructure, but first state and federal agencies must ensure the resources get to the places that need it the most.
Follow the link below to access this Stories From the Field case study as published in Digital Coast by the NOAA Office for Coastal Management.
The City of Portland, Oregon is known for its eco-friendliness. In addition to innovative policies and actions to encourage use of mass transit and renewable energy, departments across the city are embracing the need to plan for climate change