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:
- Understand Climate Change: Website maintained by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, a federal program mandated by Congress to coordinate federal research and investments in understanding forces that shape the global environment and impact society.
- FedCenter Climate Change Adaptation Program Area: Federal government resource that supports federal agency climate adaptation planning.
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Access to reports and activities concerning assessment of science related to climate change.Exit
- GeoPlatform: Federal online resource providing access to extensive geospatial datasets that may be searched on climate or weather topics such as current wildland fires, hurricane response and recovery, and coastal flooding.
- Climate Change: Resilience and Adaptation in New England (RAINE): An EPA database containing climate change vulnerability, resilience and adaptation reports, plans and webpages at the state, regional and community level.
- Climate Change in the Water Sector: EPA webpage that provides information pertaining to climate change impacts on water cycles, demands, supplies and quality. The State Water Agency Practices for Climate Adaptation Database contains climate-related water practices of state agencies, including those in Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington.
- Georgetown Climate CenterExit, University of Washington Climate Impacts GroupExit, and the Oregon State University PRISM Climate GroupExit: Materials compiled by climate change research groups based at academic institutions.