Preparing for Climate Change Impacts by Increasing Community Resilienc

Every year, hundreds of communities in the United States suffer the casualties, damages, and disruptions inflicted by extreme events. Recoveries may span from months to years, with some community recovery projects planned yet never implemented. Adapting to climate change is an urgent societal issue. The private and public sectors within the United States have embraced adaptation planning and building resilient communities as necessary to minimize these damages. In response, substantial climate change adaptation planning is occurring at all levels of the government and in local communities, yet implementation of these plans varies significantly and understanding how they contribute to reduced fiscal exposure also varies. Many local climate adaptation plans identify the need for federal partners, but few identify with which federal agencies to partner or how to prioritize plans to implement. Substantial research on how to define resilience is occurring, yet the existing literature has not yet converged on a definition. This leads to the predicament that the current techniques used to analyze climate adaptation and community resilience are not reaching their full potential and climate vulnerabilities might not be reduced as anticipated. The academic literature indicates there does not yet exist a framework to analytically test whether municipalities contains similar structures, which attributes or components are necessary and sufficient, and how feedbacks between the components lead to the properties identified as important in climate adaptation and resilience. Without a framework of this type, decision support tools cannot effectively identify the leverage points to close the implementation gap. This thesis aims to bridge this gap by identifying the critical success components and an operational strategy for community resilience and climate adaptation planning that reduces the federal fiscal exposure to climate change. The results indicate that there are critical components common to most communities to implement climate adaptation actions, there is a plausible systems framework for posing the problem, and a decision tool has been developed that will be useful to communities seeking federal resources for implementation adaptation plans.