Key Insights into Prioritizing Resilience Strategies

Governments and businesses are acting to promote resilience to climate change impacts. However, resilience planning does not occur in a vacuum. Organizations have multiple goals, including satisfying stakeholders, meeting sustainability objectives, addressing traditional pollution issues, and advancing social equity—and they operate under budget constraints as well. To explore how public and private organizations select which resilience strategies to invest in first, and inform this process for organizations just getting started, C2ES convened a Solutions Forum workshop with leaders in the field. Workshop attendees represented municipal and state governments, federal agencies, small businesses, manufacturers, technology companies, energy companies, and financial institutions. This document summarizes the key insights from the workshop, provides recommendations that resilience planners and funding agencies could adopt to support improved climate resilience, and identifies areas where future effort is needed.

Key Takeaways

  • Organizations often prioritize resilience strategies that simultaneously address other objectives.
  • Short funding and planning cycles can underestimate returns on resilience.
  • Resilience is undervalued and underfunded.
  • Mainstreaming is effective but can have drawbacks.
  • Word choice frames climate risks and opportunities.
  • Additional effort is required to promote greater public-private sector collaboration.