September 2023 Newsletter

We are excited to announce the launch of Resilient Together, a new collaboration between Albemarle County, the City of Charlottesville, and the University of Virginia.

Resilient Together is a collaborative planning and implementation effort designed to ensure our community is strong, safe, and healthy in the face of a changing climate.

Locally, we are experiencing longer, hotter heat waves, more destructive storms, wildfire smoke, and invasive pests. Scientific projections show these challenges will increase in the coming years and decades, with implications for our community’s health and well-being.

We know that natural hazards do not stop and start at the jurisdictional boundaries between Charlottesville and Albemarle County. Studies have shown that we have similar vulnerabilities and challenges. Collaborating will help us to produce better, stronger results.

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.