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Superfund

Superfund Climate Resilience: Adaptive Capacity

Adaptive Capacity

Assuring the climate change adaptive capacity of a site remedy involves:

  • Implementing new or modified measures to increase resilience of the remedy or site infrastructure, as needed.
  • Establishing plans for periodically reassessing remedy and site vulnerabilities, to determine if additional capacity is needed as cleanup progresses and climate conditions change.

Adaptive capacity is particularly important for remedies anticipated to operate for 30 years or longer. Information about how to maintain or build adaptive capacity is available in the resources below.

  • ARC-X (EPA’s Climate Change Adaptation Resource Center): Online access to tools that help communities anticipate, plan for and adapt to the changing climate. 
  • U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit: Federal inter-agency resource containing data, case studies and tools to help federal, regional, state, local, tribal, private-sector and nonprofit organizations prepare for the effects of climate change. The Toolkit provides information on specific topics such as ecosystems and built environments, summaries of state-level climate information, and access to climate-related expertise and training. Key tools include the Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flooding Impacts Viewer. The National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center built the Climate Explorer Exit, which enables planners to visualize climate data in maps and graphs that cover every county in the contiguous United States.

Information to help understand broader aspects of climate resilience planning is available through these online resources: