Community Readiness and Resilience Toolkit
Step 6: Monitor, Evaluate, and Adjust
Step 6: Monitor, Adjust, and Maintain Your Plan
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 6
As social, economic, and environmental conditions change in your community, resilience strategies (and actions) will need to be monitored, evaluated, and adjusted over time. Resilience strategies and actions may need to change over time to be effective; this makes regular assessments and willingness to redirect critically important to long-term success. In this step, you will assess whether or not the resilience strategies and actions being implemented in your community are currently meeting the community’s resilience vision and goals.
Guiding Questions
- What changes has your community undergone since you started the planning process?
- What resilience strategies are working? What strategies are not?
- What plans will you need to update in the coming year(s)?
Checklist for Step 6
- Activity 1: Monitor and Evaluate Effectiveness of Resilience Strategies
- Activity 2: Revisit and Update Your Future Planning Needs
Step 6, Activity 1: Monitor and Evaluate Effectiveness of Resilience Actions
In this activity, you will track progress, review effectiveness, and make changes to your approach as necessary.
Tips
- Allocate the appropriate resources. Tracking resilience strategies takes dedicated staff time, funding, and strategic coordination that should be planned for from the beginning of the implementation process.
- Leverage existing work. Monitoring is more effective and efficient when using an indicator that is already collected as part of day-to-day operations. This reduces the additional staff time and budget necessary to monitor the impacts.
Why?
Monitoring the implementation (pages 65-70) of your resilience actions will help identify if and how a resilience action (and strategy) is continuing to meet your community’s needs. As conditions change, so will the effectiveness of different actions. Evaluating the effectiveness of your resilience actions helps determine what impact - both desired and undesired, anticipated and unanticipated - have occurred as a result of your work.
When?
Monitoring is ongoing and dependent on the needs of the various actions. In general, an annual assessment or progress report is the standard acceptable frequency for pre-disaster and climate adaptation planning. If a disaster occurs, you may need to more immediately evaluate the actions you are currently taking and either adjust current efforts or initiate the implementation of new actions. State legislation or grant requirements may also dictate the frequency of evaluation of your resilience actions.
How does my community do this?
Define monitoring details. Determine who will be designated as the responsible party for carrying out the monitoring of specific resilience strategies and actions (this should likely be the implementation lead). In many cases, this will also require the designation of a dedicated funding source. The responsible party can be a municipal department, regional entity, or a community group. Once the responsible party is determined, make sure the team is clear how tracking resilience actions will be carried out and recorded. Be sure to establish how often your team will convene. Additional information can be found using the USDN Climate Adaptation Framework and Indicator Evaluation.
Monitor and track the implementation of actions. The following are questions that you should consider when tracking your progress:
Could annual reporting be built into existing reporting, budgets, or other frameworks that your community already uses?
How many actions have already been undertaken by various departments?
How have you engaged stakeholders in the development and implementation of your actions? Are there additional areas in which this needs to happen?
Are community partnerships in place to enable robust decision making concerning resilience planning?
To what extent have you increased the general and technical capacity of your community to prepare for current and future shocks and stressors?
How have drivers or constraints changed? Are there new opportunities available that might aid the implementation of your community’s actions now and in the future?
Conduct community outreach to seek input and feedback. This will provide you an opportunity to check in with your community to determine if the actions you are taking are yielding the benefits and impacts you envisioned.
Review the effectiveness of strategies and actions being implemented and adjust as needed. When evaluating for effectiveness, be sure to continually reference the criteria and metrics you developed in Step 5 Activity 4. During the review, it is important to consider the following questions:
Did the action/strategy get implemented as planned? If not, why?
If the action/strategy was not implemented but is still relevant, how can the Implementation Team move it to implementation?
If the action/strategy has been implemented, how effective is it? If it is less effective than planned, can any adjustments be made? If it is successful, can the strategy be implemented more widely?
Were there factors beyond your control, such as an economic downturn, that could have affected your outcomes?
How have the conditions in your community changed since implementation started?
How effective have your actions/strategies been in achieving your community’s resilience vision and goals?
How has awareness about key resilience issues and the projected impacts of your plan(s) on your community increased as a result of your efforts?
If you find that the indicator your team selected or the data collection method is not sufficient to provide you with the information you need to evaluate your actions, then make sure to adjust these indicators or monitoring strategy as necessary. For example, you may need to modify the frequency at which you collect data, which may be due to staffing/budget constraints or a determination that data needs to be collected more or less frequently. You may need to adjust the indicator itself to something that is possibly more feasible to collect or better represents the impact you are trying to measure.
Assess new data and information and adjust. Data to support resilience-focused decision-making is continuously evolving and improving, and adaptability and flexibility are key pillars of any resilient community. Resilience planning is an ongoing and iterative process, and the conditions under which you started planning will continue to change in the future. As environmental, economic, social, and political conditions change, the research your team conducted earlier in this process may need to be updated. As you learn new information about changes in your community and the effectiveness of your resilience work, you will likely need to adjust your approach to your resilience work and specific strategies.
Step 6, Activity 2: Revisit and Update Your future planning needs
In this activity, you will review the timeline for important updates to plans across the community and integrate information developed in this process into specific plan updates when needed.
Tips
Be aware of opportunities to improve or recover from undesired outcomes. If your actions aren’t producing the desired outcome, consider modifying your approach or making course corrections to your plan. With hindsight, you may be able to spot an oversight or miscalculation. If so, review your resilience options, re-evaluate your risks and costs, and then decide what additional or different actions will help you reach your goals.
Why?
Building resilience requires forward-thinking and long-term planning horizons. As you have already found, social and environmental conditions are always changing. These constant changes require attention and frequent iterations to your resilience planning.
When?
This process should be ongoing. A full analysis or assessment should align with full plan updates, as determined by the planning team or mandated by legislation or funding requirements. For example, Comprehensive Plans are generally updated every 5-10 years. This activity will likely take a few months to complete.
How does my community do this?
Review any new or updated documents or plans. Other local, regional, and state research and updates to plans will occur as you complete the implementation process. It is important that your team stays up to date on new information (policy implications, guidance documents, updated scientific information, etc.) as it becomes available. Another source for new or improved data is datasets or studies prepared in the aftermath of an event, such as a fire or flood. These resources often combine social conditions and context with bio-geophysical factors that contributed to the event and can contain useful information and lessons learned that can be applied to your resilience planning.
Assess changes within your community. It is important to ground truth your understanding of changes in your community with community input. This may be another important community engagement opportunity, or for another workshop with your implementation team, resilience strategy implementation partners, or other stakeholders. When assessing new information, important questions to consider include:
To what extent has there been a change in political leadership since the adoption of your plan?
Has there been a shift in public opinion that has led to a potential shift in priorities?
How have economic factors changed recently? Has this driven or constrained implementation (i.e. budgetary cuts, lack of third-party funding, etc.)?
Have there been societal shifts that might influence the ability of your community to implement or accept resilience strategies (i.e. increased unemployment, increase in violence and/or crime, decrease in interest in environmental issues, recent election or shift in political leadership, etc.)
Incorporate lessons learned from this process into future plan updates. As you know, resilience planning requires coordination between and among departments and levels of government. Earlier in this process (Step 4), you integrated your resilience strategies into multiple plans that affect your community. Many of these plans are led and implemented by different departments, agencies, and organizations, and it takes a lot of effort to coordinate across these entities. This is the time to make sure you are communicating what you have learned: including what has and has not worked; any new data and information; what you have changed-both in your short- and long-term planning; and how you see these updates being integrated across plans. Integrating this information into your regular policy and planning processes can be a useful mechanism to integrate resilience in your community on an ongoing basis.
Create a monitoring and evaluation plan for any new actions and strategies that are developed. As you adjust existing strategies and develop new ones, make sure you identify monitoring and evaluation processes to help you determine the success of those strategies. As monitoring processes from the initial strategies become less relevant, be ready to change how you invest in the community’s monitoring needs.
Update your plans(s) as necessary. When updating your plan(s), review new science, state-level guidance, and integrate any additional planning efforts happening across your community. See lists of potential data sources and information in Step 2. Also, keep an eye out for regional assessments emerging from universities and regional agencies or non-governmental entities that will be important to reference and include as you make updates.
Persist through setbacks to reach your goals.
Additional Guidance for Step 6
Click on the question to expand the answer.
+ Do I need to hire an outside organization to help with monitoring? Who is responsible for monitoring implementation?
Monitoring implementation strategies takes additional time and budget; however, it is an essential step in resilience planning that cannot be skipped. The most cost-effective way to undergo monitoring efforts is to use data that are already being collected for other purposes. You don’t have to be an expert to gather monitoring data, and you can ask for assistance from community groups or other entities in order to share the responsibility. Be sure that you have identified the party responsible for monitoring, regardless of who it is or how the data are collected.
+ How do/will I know if a resilience strategy is effective?
A resilience strategy is considered effective if it is helping you move closer to achieving your resilience goals and creating a positive impact on your community. Identifying indicators of success as you customize and prioritize resilience strategies and then tracking those indicators will help determine if your resilience strategy is effective. While you can use many different criteria and metrics to determine the effectiveness of your strategy, it is critical to hear directly from your community members and stakeholders to ground-truth your evaluations.
+ How often should I update my plan(s)?
How frequently you update your plan depends on a lot of different factors and can happen in many different ways. Formal updates to your plan might happen every 5-10 years; however, throughout this process, you will continually learn new information, have to adjust to changing community conditions, and become more informed about your resilience work within your community. Informal updates to your planning process, implementation plan, and monitoring and evaluation plans can occur as often as necessary, and should at least be reviewed on an annual basis. Depending on the type of plan you are undertaking, you may be mandated by the local or state level requirement to conduct updates at defined intervals. For example, a climate-smart pre-disaster hazard mitigation plan is required to be updated every 5-years to ensure access to FEMA mitigation funding post-disaster.