Climate Change Resilience & Adaptation Planning

The Problem

The City of Charleston had already done much work on sea-level rise and flooding threat when we were contacted to bring their climate and non-climate vulnerabilities and risks into focus. Charleston faced challenges from long-term sea-level rise, precipitation deluges, storm surge flooding, heat, growth in flood-prone areas, and its location in the most seismically active area on the east coast of the United States. The City needed to understand the full scope of its vulnerabilities and risks and develop a plan to address them. 

The Solution

In 2020, the City of Charleston worked closely with Fernleaf and other partners to guide them through the process of developing an All Hazards Vulnerability and Risk Assessment using the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit Steps to Resilience, our analytical engine to power the analysis, and an “all of government” approach to building the plan. Not only were flood-related hazards, such as tidal flooding and storm surge, assessed, but other threats, such as HAZMAT releases and seismic activity, were also analyzed. This plan enabled the City to have a deeper understanding of their vulnerabilities and risks, a more effective response in each government functional area, and broad community support. It also was a key foundational document from which important strategies and actions were integrated into the 2021 Charleston City Plan recommendations for resilience and equity.  

The Problem

In recent years, the City of Tallahassee, FL, experienced unprecedented disruptions from extreme weather events, from hurricanes and tornadoes to the first snow event in the last 30 years. As the capital of Florida and home to two major universities, Tallahassee’s population is growing and dynamic. The impacts of extreme weather events on infrastructure and services affect hundreds of thousands of people in the city and surrounding region. The City of Tallahassee needed a plan for understanding its climate vulnerabilities and responding to them.

The Solution

To get a better handle on the growth of the city and the increasing number of extreme weather events, the City of Tallahassee took a step toward a resilient and sustainable future in 2018 with Fernleaf. Using the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit Steps to Resilience, we facilitated a series of hands-on workshops. In 2019, the Climate Change Vulnerability and Risk Assessment was completed, which was incorporated in the Tallahassee Resilience Plan. The Plan uses the Assessment to identify strategies that strengthen the community and offer achievable, measurable, and impact-driven outcomes. One such strategy was to prioritize capital investments that build resilience by considering risk within design standards. Fernleaf also used the AccelAdapt tool to generate quantified decision support information for the City's Plan development, such as the number and type of residential properties highly vulnerable to flooding and which areas of the City that may be outside of a 5-minute drive time to fire stations.

In 2021, the City of Tallahassee realized the amount of progress made on their goals warranted a refresh of the assessment in AccelAdapt. Using updated data, Fernleaf underwent a refresh of the analysis to gain renewed insights on climate adaptation priorities.