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January 14, 2025
A milestone anniversary year for the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, 2024, also marked a record year for climate change in the United States—from far-above-average water temperatures in the Atlantic to more intensified hurricanes and prolonged extreme heat.
These threats are felt most acutely at the local level, reverberating through economies, infrastructure, ecosystems, and the health of people who live there. Frontline communities are disproportionately burdened by climate change, experiencing its impacts worst and first.
As those most intimately acquainted with the impacts of climate change, local leaders are experts in what they need to adapt. With every foot of sea level encroachment, each hurricane-induced flood, each day over 100°F, each wildfire, cities and communities have navigated how to adapt, and have already begun carrying out climate solutions tailored to their communities’ unique needs.
These efforts, however, can be fortified by support from policy makers at the federal level. Effective federal policy on climate adaptation and resilience reflects the needs, voices, and trailblazing solutions of local communities.
For 15 years, EESI has leveraged its history and rapport with Congress to bring lessons of local climate adaptation and resilience efforts to federal policymakers, through Congressional briefings, partnerships, issue briefs, and articles. EESI’s local adaptation archives date back to 2009, when EESI partnered with the Center for Climate Strategies to host a briefing, State Energy and Climate Actions: Lessons for Federal Policy. This event was later accompanied by an issue brief delineating both climate adaptation and mitigation plans across all 50 states. Another landmark year for adaptation and resilience work came in 2014, with three briefings illustrating climate resilience in the Southwest, the Midwest, and the Northeast.
Photographed from left: Dr. Patrick Gonzalez, climate change scientist at the U.S. National Park Service; Dr. Rosina Bierbaum, Westin Chair of Natural Economics at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, professor at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, and member of EESI's board of directors; Dr. Radley Horton, associate research scientist at Columbia University and convening lead author of the Third National Climate Assessment Chapter on the Northeast.
EESI ramped up its focus on locally-led adaptation and resilience starting in 2017 with a multi-year briefing series, Building Resilient and Secure Infrastructure. This twelve-part series drew mayors, city planners, resilience officers, and other municipal leaders from across the country to discuss how they have addressed climate challenges in their localities.
In December 2018, following this series’s success, the Bernard and Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust awarded EESI with a grant to continue its adaptation and resilience work, this time with a focus on coastal climate resilience and nature-based solutions. Over the next two years, this funding facilitated 16 Congressional briefings on regional coastal climate resilience, followed by a summary report highlighting key findings and policy recommendations.
In building out the briefing series, one underlying motif was kept close to heart: while the threat of climate change is far-reaching, every community experiences its impacts differently based on geography, socioeconomic level, and other factors. Solutions for building resilience to climate impacts are therefore equally diverse, tailored to each communities’ unique circumstances. Recognizing this, EESI approached its resilience work through a local lens. The briefings that resulted brought in 42 speakers across Alaska, Hawaii, the West Coast, the Great Lakes, Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, the Southeast, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northeast. Panelists brought perspectives from rural and urban areas, tribal lands, state and local government, community-based organizations and nonprofits, universities, and federal agencies.
“When you bring together 42 of the nation’s leading thinkers and doers to talk about how coastal communities are making themselves more resilient to the impacts of climate change, it is no surprise that they will have a lot to say,” EESI President Daniel Bresette commented. Panelists shared both the diverse climate challenges faced in their communities—such as infrastructure threatened by severe weather and lobstering businesses harmed by warming oceans—and solutions already in motion—from floodplain restoration in New Jersey to sea level rise mapping in California.
And the multitude of success stories of local climate resilience told across 16 Congressional briefings did not end there. In October 2020, EESI capped off the briefing series with a report for federal policymakers. A Resilient Future for Coastal Communities: Federal Policy Recommendations from Solutions in Practice brought those stories together in a way that was accessible and actionable for lawmakers, identifying 30 specific recommendations on how Congress and federal agencies can support coastal climate resilience efforts, organized by federal policy levers and Congressional committees of jurisdiction.
EESI's 2020 report, A Resilient Future for Coastal Communities: Federal Policy Recommendations from Solutions in Practice, identified six guiding principles that should be considered for climate resilience solutions across all coastal regions in the United States.
“EESI’s work putting this report together is extremely valuable and should be applauded. It shows that while we live in many different places, we all share a massive challenge of adapting to climate change to achieve safe and vibrant communities, a sustainable environment, and social and environmental justice,” said Charles Lester, director of the University of California Santa Barbara’s Ocean and Coastal Policy Center, Resilience along the West Coast panelist, and member of EESI’s Advisory Board.
Since 2020, EESI has continued its work to ensure that federal policy is informed by communities at the frontlines of the climate crisis—from podcasts covering resilience in Virginia and other coastal communities, briefings about nature-based solutions in cities, and articles highlighting adaptation and resilience in the Great Lakes region, Texas, and the farmlands of the Colorado River basin. Across this variety of resources, EESI’s approach has remained the same: bringing forward local voices to inform federal policy and legislation.
"We are showing what resilience looks like and how federal policies can encourage it," former EESI Executive Director Carol Werner said in 2019 of EESI’s resilience work. "Resilient infrastructure—both natural infrastructure and built infrastructure—will make all regions of the United States safer, stronger, and more prepared for climate impacts—but it is especially important in coastal and flood-prone regions, which are at the front line of climate change."
In this record year for climate disasters, Werner’s sentiments are as applicable today as they were in 2019. In 2025, EESI will kick off its next 40 years with a focus on resilient infrastructure. In an increasingly warming world, local expertise will be essential to this work and beyond.
Author: Nicole Pouy
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