The U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit ( USCRT) embraces an inclusive, all-of-government approach to helping decision-makers find and use federal resources they need to assist them in building resilience. Scalability and replicability of successful tools and methods are of particular interest to this program and, therefore, partnerships across all four domains—government, academic, commercial, and non-profit organizations—are essential to our success.

Working with Communities

The Biden-Harris Administration and NOAA will announce awards for the Climate-Smart Communities Initiative (CSCI) this fall to accelerate the pace of and reduce the cost of climate resilience-building for communities across the United States. The program will work with communities to co-develop equitable climate resilience plans that are ready for funding and implementation. The priority will be to assist communities that are at the highest risk to climate impacts and have the most need for assistance. NOAA will work with FEMA to assist Community Disaster Resilience Zone-designated high-risk census tracts.

The CSCI vision is to co-develop, with community representatives, equitable climate resilience in every U.S. community served. Resilience plans must explicitly help communities link their action plans to finance and funding opportunities by meeting climate risk assessment requirements for federal and/or private sources of funds.

The CSCI will help bring the commercial market for climate adaptation and resilience services to maturity through a public-private partnership that connects community decision-makers with technical resources and expertise for the purpose of co-developing finance-ready resilience plans that are equitable and guided by the best-available science. 

For more information, contact Ned Gardiner at ned.gardiner@noaa.gov.