U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit

The first is defined by the Departments of Labor and Commerce Good Jobs Principles, whereby “Good Jobs” addresses the following categories: 

• benefits; 
• diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility; 
• empowerment and representation; job security and conditions; 
• and pay, among other factors. 

Additional details on the dimensions of job quality are available here.

The second set of criteria addresses the phrase “enhance climate resilience,” which this NOFO defines as worker roles that perform one or more of the following climate-informed skills: 

1. Understand and apply equity-centered climate resilience principles, including but not limited to:
   • Understanding historical precedents leading to differential exposure of people to climate-related hazards.
   • Establishing processes for including diverse voices in articulating and delivering on climate resilience priorities.
   • Facilitating alignment with constituents on climate resilience methods and metrics for addressing impacts of greatest concern before, during, and/or after a climate-related event.
2. Understand and address exposure, vulnerability, and risk to climate-related impacts, including but not limited to:
   • Identifying the best available science and knowledge necessary to understand and use projections of climate risk.
   • Establishing metrics for evaluating actions to enhance climate resilience, taking into consideration multiple value systems to ensure long-term sustainability, including but not limited to monetary value, community values, continuity of operations, supply chain reliability, business functions, ecosystem services, and other services.
   • Establishing a means to prioritize potential climate-related impacts so that the return on investment of one project may be evaluated relative to that of another. 
   • Measuring initial conditions, as well as improvements to climate resilience.
   • Developing funding and finance plans for resilience projects that include all phases of implementation, as well as a plan to ensure the longevity of the work.
3. Design, build, operate, maintain, and/or improve the infrastructure (including nature-based systems) and systems needed to reduce climate-related vulnerability and/or risk to people, assets, services, resources, ecosystems, or other attributes valued by individuals, businesses, communities, and/or governments.
4. Other relevant skills.
   • The applicant must demonstrate that “other relevant skills” are necessary to complete climate resilience work that may be missing in the applicant’s workforce.
   • Such skills may be defined by climate-resilience plans, employers, and resilience experts.

The CRW directly supports actions from the Ocean Climate Action Plan (OCAP), including:

• Promote coastal community resilience strategies that are adaptive, equitable, and based on best practices.
• Support transformational resilience investments in coastal habitat restoration, conservation, and in coastal community resilience.
•  Advance evaluation and adoption of nature-based solutions, such as living shorelines, to build resilience against climate-driven coastal hazards.
• Reduce climate threats and improve the resiliency of climate-vulnerable protected species, including marine mammals.  

Skills that solely lead to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (i.e., “mitigate climate change”) as their primary focus (for example, building renewable energy infrastructure) are not included under “good jobs that enhance climate resilience,” for the purpose of this funding opportunity. However, where greenhouse gas reductions are co-benefits of resilience efforts, such projects are welcome.

In this NOFO, applicants can use funds to develop or fill good jobs that enhance climate resilience in a variety of ways. A project may address one or more skills, across one or more roles, and at a variety of geographic scales. Below are several descriptive scenarios describing how climate-informed skills might be incorporated into new or enhanced worker roles through this opportunity. Even if not explicitly described in these examples, all skills from the list above may be cited as relevant within a given proposal.  

Scenario 1 - one skill, one role:  An investment-oriented professional organization, in collaboration with major lending institutions, establishes a partnership to train 70 employees who were slated to be laid off due to technological redundancies and obtain commitments to hire them to a new chosen career path as Climate Equity Officers within multiple regional offices after they learn how to establish baselines and assess risks that climate variability and change pose to the capital investments and the collateral of customers.  

Scenario 2 - one skill, multiple roles:  Recognizing that some groups face a greater risk of heat-related illness than others, as a result of age or poor health, or the lack of resources that enable them to adapt or recover, a major municipal health-care provider partners with community groups to create 125 entry to mid-level positions for heat-health outreach specialists/assistants, nurses, and home health coordinators to talk with patients, visit homes, and help residents identify current and future heat-health risks and connect those residents with community resources to mitigate them.

Scenario 3 - multiple skills, one role:  A region’s coastal-resilience plan requires crews that can address coastal erosion using nature-based solutions. One thousand workers are retrained in multiple cohorts for entry-level work on coastal landscapes, with special training on erosion prevention, uses of native plants, and wetland restoration.

Scenario 4 - multiple skills, one role:  A new partnership has identified a new local government worker role, Climate Resilience Officer, is needed in urban communities in a multi-state region to work with disadvantaged community leadership to incorporate local knowledge of recurrent flooding and elevated flood risks so they can secure funds to protect at-risk populations and improve stormwater management systems, transportation networks, and other critical infrastructure. They propose to recruit and train four cohorts of 20 people each, for a total of 80 new hires.

Scenario 5 - multiple skills, one role: A coalition of community-based organizations in historically underserved communities come together to recruit and train 65 grant managers who have the skills to solicit, write and manage grants to improve climate resilience in those communities.

Scenario 6 - multiple skills, multiple roles:  The state’s Climate Action Council brings municipal, county and state agencies together to identify a diverse set of needed skills, for which 30 new transportation analysts and 40 new water resource planners will be trained and hired to implement community climate resilience plans.

Scenario 7 - multiple skills, multiple roles:  A coastal city has received a large climate resilience federal grant to implement the next stage of their climate resilience master plan. Through the plan, they have identified essential worker roles that need to be recruited to build a comprehensive flood defense infrastructure project, which includes appropriate use of nature-based solutions, that will protect the city’s waterfront from strengthening coastal storms for decades into the future. To complete the project and ensure its upkeep over time, the city needs to hire 45 resilience landscape technicians and 30 environmental inspectors to bury floodwalls, design landscapes that create a line of elevated ridges, and conduct ongoing modifications and maintenance.