Development of a Climate Resilience Screening Index (CRSI) and its potential for application in the U.S. - Conference Abstract
Citation:
Summers, Kevin, L. Smith, L. Harwell, AND K. Buck. Development of a Climate Resilience Screening Index (CRSI) and its potential for application in the U.S. - Conference Abstract. 13th International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability, Niteroi, BRAZIL, January 19 - 21, 2017.
Impact/Purpose:
Climate Resilience Index is a requested product by ORD AA and EPA Administrator through SHC Program. Index needed to assess states', counties', and communities' abilities of recovery from climate events. Audience: Internal EPA (Administrator, IO, OLEM, OW and OAR) and external (states, counties and communities). Product will compare the preparedness of various entities for selected climate events and likely ability to recovery and, thus, could be used to assess Agency investments in resilience.
Description:
A Climate Resilience Screening Index is being developed that is applicable at multiple scales for the United States. Those scales include national, state, county and community. The index will be applied at the first three scales and at selected communities. The index was developed in order to explicitly include domains, indicators and metrics addressing environmental, economic and societal aspects of climate resilience. In addition, the index uses indicators and metrics that assess ecosystem, economic, governance and social services at these scales. Finally, we are developing forecasting approaches that can relate intended changes in services and governance to likely levels of changes in the resiliency of communities to climate change impacts. The present challenge is the incorporation of the index, its relationships to governance and the developing forecasting tools into Federal decision-making across US government and into state/county/community decision-making across the US. Governmental acceptance of changes to policies often can be just as challenging as the initial technical acceptance of the index and its relation to climate change.