1: How to Use the Community Resilience Workbook
Starting a process of planning for climate change can be a daunting task. With many resources at the local, state, and national levels around climate adaptation, including decision support and analysis tools, guidance documents, and map viewers it’s difficult to know which ones are most helpful. The Community Resilience Workbook (CRW) synthesizes available guidance and resources to date into one document and provides a framework and stepwise process for including climate change in community-wide planning, municipal operations, or in homes and businesses for multiple users.2 The CRW organizes steps in building resilience to guide a sustainable, long-term approach for communities and local governments. Additionally outlined are pathways to collaborate within your community and with other experts in the region. Each section of the report is supported by case studies for users to access tangible examples and to promote connection with peers.
The Community Resilience Workbook aims to:
- Strengthen community resilience processes and outcomes by providing a comprehensive framework for building resilience
- Ensure communities receive appropriate levels of guidance to incorporate climate resilience into day-to-day decision-making, including questions to ask when developing policy, plans, programs, and projects.
- Provide communities a resource to point to that gives initiative to climate action
- Provide clear decision support tools and information for those working on community resilience initiatives
- Ensure resources are allocated equitably
- Ensure resources allocated are used effectively
- Ensure local efforts are defensible and replicable
- Create a community of practice for transferable lessons
- Offer metrics to evaluate projects that can be consistently applied across the region
The guidance of the Community Resilience Workbook builds on many years of practice, trial and error, learning, and success by municipalities and their partners to build community resilience to climate change impacts in Maine and to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Previous efforts and new initiatives continue to inform statewide responses and policies to meet community resilience needs. 3
2 As part of tailoring this workbook to Maine’s unique needs, authors examined and synthesized the best available community resilience guidance already in use in Maine as well as existing resources from other states, federal agencies, and climate change adaptation networks.
3 Community resilience efforts at the state level in Maine have been advanced through various initiatives that have been informed by community-level actions since at least the early 2000s with enacted legislation for initial State Climate Action and Adaptation Plans and coalition building.