Steps to Resilience Overview

The Steps to Resilience framework encompasses the team building, data gathering, and decision making it takes for a local climate champion and a team of engaged community members to enhance their resilience to climate-related impacts. The framework is aligned with and inclusive of other efforts to reduce risk through adaptation. 

Steps to Resilience
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What is the Steps to Resilience framework?

The framework describes a process to help communities learn about their local climate hazards, identify their most pressing climate-related issues, and work together to develop an equitable climate resilience plan. The framework can also help people recognize potential opportunities presented by changing climate conditions.

Circular diagram with "engage" gear at center, with iterative steps to resilience around the perimeter

Following the Steps, climate champions build a team to explore local climate issues, list their community assets—the things they want to protect, determine which assets could be harmed by climate-related hazards, investigate possible solutions, make plans to address their greatest concerns, and take action to implement their plans.

The framework is compatible with other climate adaptation processes in use by various sectors and across different regions. These Steps were codified as part of the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit to help systematize, compare, and promote resilience-building efforts across the nation.

Whichever process you follow, effective resilience-building requires you to evaluate exposure, vulnerability, and risk from climate-related impacts, and integrate the results with other considerations before setting priorities, developing plans, and implementing projects.

Who is in the target audience for the Steps to Resilience?


What's your starting point?


Success stories

The Steps to Resilience framework has been applied at scales as small as community neighborhoods and as large as entire states. These reports illustrate how the framework was used at various scales: 

Several other cities follow the Steps to Resilience framework to produce and update their Climate Action Plans. For examples, see Case Studies featuring Asheville, North Carolina and Blacksburg, Virginia, or explore the Toolkit's full collection of case studies that describe how businesses, communities, and regional groups across the nation are building resilience. 

References

The Steps to Resilience were inspired by and/or adapted from the following sources:

Last modified
26 November 2023 - 12:10pm