Adaptation to Resilience Planning: Alternative Pathways to Prepare for Climate Change

Increasingly, local governments are creating resilience plans. What do these plans contain and how do they compare to other efforts to plan for climate change? We use plan evaluation to analyze 10 resilience plans from U.S. cities in the 100 Resilient Cites program and compare them to 44 climate change adaptation plans. Resilience plans lack critical elements to prepare cities for climate change but offer a platform to address economic, social, and environmental policies that may amplify climate change impacts. Resilience planning represents an alternative, potentially complementary, path to preparing for climate change, but there is room for improvement.

Automated summary

Increasingly, local governments are developing resilience plans to address climate change impacts. However, these plans lack critical elements for climate preparedness, although they provide a platform to tackle economic, social, and environmental policies that may amplify climate change impacts. Resilience planning represents an alternative, potentially complementary approach to climate change preparedness, but there is still room for improvement.