NOAA Climate Adaptation Partnerships (CAP) may have resources available. For example, the Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative awarded community grants in 2023 to support justice-focused, environmental, and climate projects that advance community-centered resilience priorities. Check with your regional CAP program to see if there are current funding opportunities available.

Unfortunately, there is not yet a single searchable resource to help find funding sources. However, for infrastructure-based projects, there is a searchable resource, the Local Infrastructure Hub, to help communities find funding resources related to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The Ready-to-Fund Resilience Toolkit also has many useful resources.

While funding is available for a wide variety of projects and processes, finding funding is facilitated when projects: 

1. have clearly-defined outcomes that are expected to lead to increased resilience,
2. include a robust community engagement plan,
3. explicitly incorporate consideration of equity throughout the process, and
4. prioritize nature-based solutions. 

Explore the Ready-to-Fund Resilience Toolkit here. 

There are a number of large federal programs that are often used to fund adaptation projects, such as FEMA's Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grants, funding can also be available through state agencies, private foundations, and increasingly through private investment. Municipal bonds are often used, particularly when the resilience project is infrastructure-focused.

The somewhat unsatisfactory answer is "it depends". Scale and location matter significantly with NbS solutions. Grey infrastructure, such as seawalls or dams, can have much higher capital costs at the front end for permitting and construction, relative to NbS. NbS can require larger land footprints than grey infrastructure to achieve desired benefits, so costs could be significant where land value is high. It is important to understand the opportunity costs of implementing NbS when other land uses are in consideration (e.g., agricultural or urban development). Planning for NbS should also take into consideration ongoing maintenance costs (e.g., irrigation or fertilizer to establish plantings, ongoing mowing or weeding to maintain desired vegetation assemblages). 

Nature-based solutions have several potential advantages over gray (engineered, human-made) infrastructure, including: co-benefits not present with gray infrastructure, such as provisioning habitat, increasing biodiversity, and having aesthetic qualities. If constructed appropriately, nature-based solutions have the capacity to be self-regulating and respond and adjust to change, (e.g., a vegetative community whose members can shift in relative dominance over time in response to changing weather conditions; marsh vegetation that can trap sediment and build upon itself, adding capacity for resilience to sea level rise). 

“Nature-based Solutions” (NbS) describes the potential for natural systems to provide a diverse array of benefits, including pollution reduction and natural buffers for climate-related hazards. NbS can encompass a wide range of options, from reliance on still-intact natural systems and restoration of key ecosystems to the use of engineered systems designed to emulate natural system functions, for example, rain gardens for managing stormwater or urban tree planting to mitigate urban heat islands.