Community Readiness and Resilience Toolkit

Step 4: Develop Resilience Strategies

 

 

 
 
 

Step 4: Develop Resilience Strategies

 
 

Step 1

Get Started

Step 2

Identify Concerns and Gather Information

Step 3

Assess Vulnerability, Understand Risks

Step 4

Develop Resilience Strategies

Step 5

Take Action

Step 6

Monitor, Adjust, and Maintain Your Plan

 

Step 4

In this step, you will brainstorm, develop, and prioritize resilience strategies to address the vulnerabilities and risks you identified in Step 3. It will also help you identify where and how to implement strategies or mainstream them into other specific planning efforts. The application of individual resilience strategies will depend on the key concern being addressed, the sector the action applies to, and the existing planning efforts and resources available to the community.

Guiding Questions

  • What resilience strategies does your community already use that could potentially address future shocks and stressors?
  • How can you ensure that the resilience strategies developed in this process will work for your community?
  • How can you leverage existing work already happening in your community to support your planning efforts?
  • Are there resilience strategies that should be planned for now but that will need to be implemented in the future?

Checklist for Step 4

  • Activity 1: Reassess Priority Planning Focus and Goals
  • Activity 2: Brainstorm, Evaluate, and Prioritize Resilience Strategies
  • Activity 3: Compile and Communicate Your Results
  • Activity 4: Deep Dive into Pre-Disaster Recovery Planning

 

Step 4, Activity 1: Reassess Priority Planning Focus and Goals

In this activity, you will revisit your planning approach (Step 1, Activity 3) and determine how you will address the risks and vulnerabilities identified in Step 3. This will help determine how to best develop, prioritize, and implement potential resilience strategies.

Tips

  • Ensure the declaration adheres to the provisions of C.R.S. 24-33.5-709.
  • Include information on timelines of the state of emergency (must expire within 7 days except by consent of the governing board.
  • Detail the special provisions and authorities that are conferred by the declaration in the language of the declaration itself.
  • The State does not require a declaration to provide assistance.

Why?

Now that you understand the risks and vulnerabilities of your community, it is important to revisit your planning scope and goals before you move forward. Revisiting your community engagement timeline and goals will help you identify how to best support the development of strategies that address your vulnerabilities and risks.

When?

This process generally takes one to three weeks to complete.

How does my community do this?

  1. Reassess your community’s overarching resilience goals and vision. Now that you have completed the vulnerability and risk assessments (Step 3), it is important to revisit your resilience vision, goals, and guiding principles (Step 2). Make adjustments as needed. A few key questions to consider:

    • Does your community’s resilience goal still resonate with your team now that you have completed the vulnerability and risk assessment? If not, what needs to change?

    • When do you foresee those goals and visions being updated in the future?

  2. Define objectives for addressing the vulnerabilities identified in Step 3. Use your overarching community resilience goals to help guide the development of your objectives. Objectives are specific statements intended to help you overcome the shocks and stressors identified in Step 3. For example, if you have identified increasing wildfire risk as a key concern in your community, your objective may be to reduce wildfire risk or to enhance the evacuation preparedness of your community, or both. Additional objectives could include: enhance drought preparedness; reduce the impact of shorter, warmer winters on the tourism economy; reduce wildfire risk; enhance biodiversity; reduce the impact of extreme heat events; and more.  A few key questions to consider:

    • What shocks and stressors were identified in Step 3?

    • Does your community already have planning objectives defined?

    • How might your objectives change over time? 

    • How do you define success for your objectives?

 

Step 4, Activity 2: Brainstorm, Evaluate, and Prioritize Potential Resilience Strategies

In this activity, you will explore, evaluate, and prioritize resilience strategies and actions that help you reach your community vision and goals and address the risks and vulnerabilities identified in Step 3.

Tips

  • Consider all options. Remember, at this stage in the process, don’t make judgments about the feasibility, cost, or political implications of implementing certain resilience strategies/actions. That analysis will happen later. It is your responsibility as a planner to make sure that you have considered all available possibilities and that a diverse (and equitable) range of options are on the table.
  • Take advantage of some foundational resources. For example, in climate change adaptation planning, you may identify ideas from the Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange, the Georgetown Climate Adaptation Clearinghouse, the Mountain West Climate Services Partnership, and the US Climate Resilience Toolkit. Organize these resilience actions in your library by objective as defined in Activity 1, or by vulnerability/risk.
  • Facilitate a Community Workshop. This is a perfect activity to focus on during an advisory committee meeting and/or a community workshop. Determine how to best garner input from your community and/or advisory committee on the development of resilience strategies/actions to create innovative, locally-grounded, and relevant ideas.
  • Match the scope of your planning efforts to the magnitude of projected change. For example, if your local economy is dependent on snow tourism and projections show significant reductions or changes to your snowpack over the coming decades, identifying opportunities that enhance the resilience of your local economy may be a priority.

Why?

You don’t have to start from scratch. Innovative, effective, and equitable resilience strategies and actions are being developed by communities across the state, country, and world. This broad list of seed strategies will give you a foundation to start from when thinking about which strategies will work best for your community. Do not be afraid to lean into this larger network instead of starting from scratch. Not all of the resilience strategies you identify will make the final cut. Evaluating your list of resilience strategies based on specific criteria will ensure that you are using a systematic approach to making recommendations for their integration into community plans and their implementation. 

When?

Now that you understand your vulnerabilities and risks, you can start to develop strategies to address them. This process generally takes three to six weeks. It can take longer and ultimately depends on the size of your community, your planning budget, the availability of your advisory team members, and the number of strategies you have compiled.

How does my community do this?

  • Gather existing community resilience strategies and actions. Collect and compile existing strategies and actions in a central repository (such as this Resilience Strategies Template in the workbook), organized by sector, shock or stressor, resilience goal, or objectives (as identified in Activity 1).  

    • A quick note on terminology: generally, the term “strategy” refers to a high-level overarching theme, and the term “action” refers to a more specific approach that falls underneath that theme. For example, in the La Plata County Resilience Framework, one of the four strategies identified was to “Identify and remove barriers to equity for all those in our community.” And underneath that overarching strategy, they developed several actions, including “Construct and execute an equity training curriculum for local and regional government, educators, non-profits, and the business community so that equity is a consideration in agency and organizational planning and programming.” Generally, the more specific the action, the easier it is to implement and measure success. Key questions to consider:

      • What communities face similar challenges to yours and are already planning for and/or implementing resilience strategies and actions to address those challenges

      • What is the best way to organize your resilience strategies and actions? By shock/stressor? By objective? By sector? By resilience goal?

  • Gather existing local, regional, state, and national resilience actions. Continue to compile strategies and actions from communities across the state (and across the West) that are likely facing similar challenges to yours. For example, if your community is in the process of developing resilience strategies/actions to address the impacts of declining tourism due to decreasing snowpack, you may pull inspiration from communities across the region or state that are implementing innovative investments in tourism that don’t rely on snow. The action may not be exactly right for you as is but will provide a foundation for you to build on. Key questions include:

    • Are there local or regional communities that inspire you in your resilience work?

    • What communities are facing similar shocks and stressors? Have they learned any important lessons in their resilience or recovery work that would work in your community?

    • How can you build on the great resilience work already happening across the state?

  • Customize resilience actions specifically for your community. Use your local expertise and work with your core team and advisory groups (as appropriate) to refine and customize resilience actions for your community.

  • Next, determine your approach to evaluating resilience actions. Depending on the capacity, funding, and time available to your team, determine your approach to evaluating resilience strategies/actions gathered in your library. You may only have the capacity, time, and funding to vote on or select a number of high-level resilience strategies with your core team. Yet, you may have the capacity and time to conduct a detailed evaluation qualitative analysis (e.g., scoring resilience actions based on high, medium, and low effectiveness). See the Evaluation Template in the workbook to help you with this work. 

  • Evaluate and prioritize your resilience strategies/actions. Using the approach agreed upon by your core team, complete the evaluation process to determine which actions are a potential fit for your community. A systematic approach to evaluation will help you 1) determine which actions are not relevant or are not a good fit for your community; 2) help you rank/rate your actions; and, 3) set you up to refine and prioritize actions. Key questions could also include:

    • How much capacity, time, and funding does your team have to complete the evaluation process?

    • How big is your draft resilience library? Does the size of your library help you determine whether or not you need to take a systematic approach to evaluate resilience strategies/actions?

    • What evaluation process and methodology best fits your team and community’s current and future needs?

    • Which selection criteria are most relevant to your community?

Following the evaluation process, discard the resilience strategies or actions that are not were not determined to be a good fit for your community at this time; however, keep in mind that some of these actions may become relevant if natural, social, or economic conditions change in your community in the future. Refine your library, and reorganize for ease of use. Once you have a semi-final list of customized resilience actions, prioritize which actions should be integrated into your plan(s). Take a look at the Final Action Template in the workbook for an example. For more information, reference pages 83-106 in the Climate Ready Communities Guide to Building Climate Resilience. 

  • Draft initial implementation details and indicators of success for your priority resilience actions. Once the resilience action prioritization process is complete, use the prioritized list to draft initial implementation details for those specific actions. You will refine these details in Step 5, Activity 4. Implementation details may include initial cost estimate ranges, time for implementation ranges, implementation leads, potential partners, indicators of success, opportunities for mainstreaming, etc. Defining (and ultimately tracking) indicators of success for each priority action will help your community measure progress as they are integrated. From there, start to think about what potential capacity building, training, or funding needs you may need to address as you move into the implementation process. Putting in the effort to define these details now will help to streamline your implementation process and create more effective actions.

Community Call Out: Eagle County, CO

In Eagle County, Colorado, county officials collected, compiled, and built off resilience strategies from across the county, region, state, and country for the development of the Eagle County Community Resilience Plan. This process helped in the formation of locally-grounded, strategic, and more effective resilience strategies that were then adopted as a formal part of their resilience framework. Strategies were developed in four main categories: health and wellness, the economy, natural resources, and infrastructure.

Community Call Out: Arvada, CO

As a part of the City of Arvada Resilience Strategy, the core planning team supported the process of defining what success looks like for each strategy, as well as specific actions that will be taken in the near future. Resilience strategies were identified from a variety of local, regional, state, and national sources, and helped create the foundation and framework for the core planning team to make them locally specific. In addition, they identified areas of “strategic alignment” in their framework as a means of building off of existing work already happening in the community.

 

Step 4, Activity 3: Integrate Resilience into your Plans

In this activity, you will integrate high-priority resilience actions into your plan(s), and publish your plan(s) so that it will be formally supported by municipal leadership and the broader community.

Tips

  • Ensure buy-in from leadership. Communicate regularly with municipal leadership so that they are aware of where you are in the planning process, can help you solve potential challenges, and ensure that there are no surprises after you have invested all of this time, money, and energy into your resilience planning efforts.
  • Prepare for skeptics. Be prepared to encounter community members who are critical, skeptical, or in denial about the science. Communicate clearly, use credible sources in your published materials, and most importantly, listen.
  • Keep your momentum! Publishing your plan(s) is only the beginning of your resilience journey. Implementation is crucial to enhancing the resilience of your community, so find opportunities to maintain momentum into the next phase of your journey.

Why?

To chart a clear and more resilient path towards implementation, you need to integrate priority resilience strategies/actions into the appropriate plan(s) and/or policies and ensure that you have crucial buy-in from leadership and the broader community. Compiling all of the results and establishing the path forward is the key first step before you can implement resilience strategies.

When?

This process can take between one to three months.

How does my community do this?

  1. Determine how your prioritized actions will be utilized in your plan(s) or policies. In some cases, you will be able to integrate actions identified directly into a plan update or into a new plan you are developing. In other cases, you will utilize your list of prioritized actions to develop new policies or programs. Revisiting your planning scope will guide this decision-making process. For example, actions developed through this process can be integrated into a Pre-Disaster Recovery Plan, a Climate Change Resilience and Adaptation Plan, a Comprehensive Plan, a Local Hazard Mitigation Plan, or more.

  2. Update or develop your plan(s) or policies using the priority resilience actions from Activity 2. This is a particularly important milestone in the pre-disaster recovery planning process. For more information, see the pre-disaster recovery planning page. 

  3. Publish a draft version of your plan(s) for public review. Community engagement is crucial at this stage. This may be the first time that some community members will understand what the resilience planning process will look like in action. Providing ample opportunity for community members to comment on the plan(s) will ensure that their voices are heard and that their input is integrated into the final product. Current and future shocks and stressors impact us all; therefore, it is important to empower your community to play an important role in the process. In addition, be sure to solicit feedback from neighboring jurisdictions, the county, and additional organizations relevant to decision-making in this area.

  4. Finalize the plan. After you have provided the public an opportunity to comment, make suggestions, and identify potential changes to your draft plan, integrate those changes and finalize your plan.

  5. Present final materials to municipal leadership. After you have finalized the plan, present your final materials to municipal leadership so that the plan can be formally adopted

 

Step 4, Activity 4: Deep Dive into Pre-Disaster Recovery Planning

Pre-disaster recovery planning helps to facilitate the coordination of disaster recovery efforts before a disaster occurs. For a deep-dive, go to the Pre-Disaster Recovery Planning Page on the CRO website.

 

Additional Guidance for Step 4

Click on the question to expand the answer.

+ How do I identify resilience strategies/actions that my community already uses?

Often, local resilience strategies/actions already exist and may already have the benefit of having dedicated funding. These may be strategies/actions that your community is already implementing, is in the process of implementing, or has identified as a need but has not yet implemented. Look at your existing community plans library and scour the Comprehensive Plan, Local Hazard Mitigation Plan, Climate Adaptation Plan, and more. Be sure to reference municipal plans, county-level plans, and the plans of other nearby communities. You may also identify resilience strategies/actions established by community organizations, businesses, non-profit organizations, non-governmental organizations, etc.

+ How in-depth do our evaluation and assessment of resilience strategies/actions need to be?

This is completely up to you, your core planning team, and the advisory committee. If you have the capacity and resources to conduct a full evaluation of resilience strategies/actions, you will likely benefit from having a much more specific list of customized. Ultimately, the more specific you are, the easier it will be to implement, create metrics for success, and measure that success. But, if capacity and resources are limiting factors, a more high-level assessment and evaluation process at the strategy level will get you started.

+ How can I ensure that the strategies/actions developed will work for my community?

By using a strategic assessment and evaluation process. This is a time-consuming process and will require substantial support to complete. In addition, by using local and regional ideas as a starting point, you will likely encounter many strategies/actions that have been developed to address regional shocks and stressors. We also recommend that you undergo an in-depth and systematic approach to evaluating resilience actions.