White House publishes climate resilience framework, announces more than $500M for resilience projects

While communities across the United States scramble to recover from the impact of increasingly devastating natural disasters—and prepare for whatever comes next—the federal government is taking unprecedented steps to guide local governments through a first-ever White House Climate Resilience Summit and its National Climate Resilience Framework.

“In just the first eight months of the year, there have been 23 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters—more than any other year on record,” according to a fact sheet from the White House about the initiative. The summit will include representatives from more than 25 states, territories, and tribes, and will amplify the leadership of climate resilience in communities: “The construction workers, educators, resource managers, city and state resilience officers, emergency managers, local and Tribal leaders, and many others who are striving to help their communities adapt to today’s climate impacts and prepare for future climate risks.”

The climate resilience framework is a 30-page document outlining six areas of focus that are designed to guide federal investment efforts.

Those focus areas are: embedding resilience into planning and management; increasing resilience of the built environment; mobilizing capital, investment, and innovation to advance climate resilience at scale; equipping communities with information and resources; sustainably managing lands and waters to enhance resilience; helping communities become safer, healthier, equitable, and economically strong. Each section describes specific actions that can be taken at the local level to increase resilience. Suggested actions include things like community-driven relocation through buyout programs, land swaps, and conservation land trusts, and by supporting essential workers as they respond to climate stress.

“These are the types of locally tailored and community-driven solutions that are at the center of the Biden-Harris Administration’s climate resilience strategy—and that are essential to building a climate resilient nation,” the White House brief continues. The framework is “designed to guide and align climate resilience investments and activities by the federal government and its partners.”

Coinciding with the announcements, the White House highlighted guidance from the Department of the Treasury that provides up to $5,000 each to contractors whose work on homes meets an energy star rating. The federal government also published a series of climate resilience grants, and announced a new climate code standard along with more than $500 million in awards for resilience projects. Of that investment, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Climate Adaptation Partnerships program is awarding $3.9 million to projects in flood-impacted communities in Hawai’i, the U.S. Caribbean, and the East Coast, and to projects in wildfire-impacted communities in Colorado and New Mexico.