U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit

An ArcGIS Tutorial Series to help users apply the geographic approach for climate resilience planning. Using a climate resilience planning process—the Steps to Resilience documented in the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit—this curriculum is designed to help you use geographic information systems to document climate hazards that could harm the people and places you care about, decide which situations you most want to avoid, and come up with workable solutions to reduce your climate-related risks.

This Implementation Guide is designed to help transportation practitioners understand how and where nature-based and hybrid solutions can be used to improve the resilience of coastal roads and bridges. Upfront, it summarizes the potential flood-reduction benefits and co-benefits of these strategies. From there, the guide follows the steps in the project delivery process, providing guidance on how to consider nature-based solutions in the planning process, how to conduct a site assessment to determine whether nature-based solutions are appropriate, key engineering and ecological design considerations, permitting approaches, construction considerations, and monitoring and maintenance strategies. The guide also includes appendices with site characterization tools, decision support for selecting nature-based solutions, suggested performance metrics, and links to additional tools and resources.

Developed for stormwater and floodplain managers, as well as land use planners, this interactive website incorporates tools and methods to derive critical coastal water-level thresholds, as well as assess the potential impacts of exceeding those thresholds on stormwater infrastructure. Managers can take various actions to address the issue, and this guide introduces planning, policy, on-the-ground, and funding options.

The practices described in this handout can be used to reduce flooding and help communities design a green infrastructure strategy. It should be noted that while green infrastructure practices make communities more resilient, flooding might not be totally alleviated. Topics explored in this training include green infrastructure practices, considerations for planning and implementation, and guidance on estimating storage potential and costs. This document is a companion piece to the NOAA's Process Guide for Assessing Costs and Benefits of Green Infrastructure for Flood Mitigation.