Resilient Together: About the Project
Through this project, we seek to define resilience, identify opportunities, and design strategies to build resilience.
We can think about resilience in terms of preparedness, emergency response, and recovery—before, during, and after a severe weather event. Building resilience starts with identifying strengths (where the community is working well) and gaps (where there is a need for improvement) in how we prepare for, respond to, and recover from natural disasters or extreme weather events.
This project will build on community strengths.
Our community possesses numerous strengths we can leverage to build resilience to the impacts of climate change. These include neighborhood groups, local businesses, service-oriented nonprofits, schools, local governments, and informal mutual aid networks among community members, to name a few.
Solutions can take many forms, such as protecting and enhancing tree cover to provide cooling shade during a heat wave to increasing the capacity of emergency responders during a flooding event.
Through this planning process, we will gather input from community members, nonprofits, businesses, and local government staff to identify strategies that build on strengths and address needs for meeting the challenges that climate change is bringing to our region.
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An Introduction to the Process
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Climate Protection Program and Community Engagement staff from the City of Charlottesville, Albemarle County, and the University of Virginia have worked together to design a process that offers welcoming and inclusive participation opportunities for all members of our community.
This will include inclusive community engagement, consultation with partner organizations and subject-matter experts, and guidance from staff across both organizations. The two local governments’ Climate Protection Programs will lead and facilitate the process, in the following phases:
- Discover: In the discovery phase, we will build a shared understanding of how climate change will affect us locally. Staff will work to share information about increased hazards and impacts, but we also want to hear stories from community members about how their lives have been affected. We will provide both in-person and virtual engagement opportunities. The outcome of this phase is to prepare the community to engage in the design of climate adaptation and resilience strategies in a way that is informed and knowledgeable. Broadly, the goal of this phase is to build relationships, share information, and understand community members’ experiences.
- Define: In the second phase, Climate Program Staff will work primarily with stakeholders within each local government to define the scope and goals of the Climate Adaptation and Resilience Plans, informed by the discovery phase’s community engagement. We will invite feedback from staff across our organizations and a roundtable of key community stakeholders on proposed goals.
- Design: During the design phase, we will engage with community members, partner organizations, and government staff to develop resilience strategies and actions. The outcome of this phase will be the primary strategies for each entity’s Climate Adaptation and Resilience Plan.
- Decide: Climate Protection Program staff will assemble the goals, strategies, and other content collected and developed in all previous phases into the draft plans. Once the drafts are written, they will be shared with key staff in our organizations, partner entities, and the community for feedback. This feedback will be used to revise the plans, which will be presented to each entity’s elected body for adoption.
- Do: Implementing the newly adopted plans will include committing local funds and submitting grant applications to fund specific projects, collaborating with partner agencies and the community to implement strategies, and monitoring progress and evaluating success at regular intervals.
Stay Informed & Engaged
Videos
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This video is a recording of the presentation by the 2023 Virginia Emerging Leaders in Architecture about their investigation into Climate Resilience Hubs in Albemarle County.
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Albemarle County is already experiencing climate change—longer heat waves, more intense rain events, and seasonal disruption. To prepare for greater extremes in weather patterns, we will work with the community to develop a climate adaptation and resilience plan. The first step in producing this plan is to understand how weather events exacerbated by climate change—so-called climate hazards—will impact our community, environment, and infrastructure. The County’s Climate Vulnerability and Risk Assessment, published in June 2022, presents this information. Preparing for Resilience provides an overview of the key takeaways.
This is a video of a community event in which we discussed the main conclusions of this report and reviewed our next steps in building resilience as a community and local government. We began with an overview of the report’s key takeaways, which was followed by a panel discussion by local experts to help contextualize these themes within the daily lives of community members. We closed with an outline of the next steps in preparing for resilience, including our community engagement process to help develop a climate adaptation resilience plan.