State, Federal Officials Work to Measure Progress in Fight to Limit Climate Impacts

States and federal agencies are dedicating more staff, time, and resources than ever to help prepare communities, infrastructure, and ecosystems for a more extreme climate. With this encouraging activity comes a need to measure the progress and impact of resilience initiatives to determine which have proved successful—and which are falling short—and to use that information to direct future funding and revise efforts as needed.  

To help evaluate ongoing resilience initiatives, the State Resilience Planning Group (SRPG)—a peer network of state resilience officials and agency directors—met June 5 in Washington, D.C., to review best practices in measuring progress and communicating successes. The meeting, hosted by The Pew Charitable Trusts, drew more than 60 experts and practitioners from 15 states, six federal agencies, nonprofits, and academia to examine approaches to measure resilience progress in Massachusetts, South Carolina, Washington, and across the federal government.

Embedding resilience into day-to-day business

In June, 24 federal agencies released their updated climate adaptation plans for 2024-27. The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) also released the first indicators and metrics to assess how the federal government is building resilience into its operations.

Dr. Stephanie Morris, director for resilience and adaptation for CEQ, told the SRPG audience that CEQ focused on developing process-related metrics “that are relevant and adaptable for federal agencies [and] will help measure [to] what extent climate is considered in planning, budgeting, and other processes.” Process-related metrics are different from outcome-related indicators, which measure how well systems function when faced with climate stressors and shocks, or if adaptation actions are working. State and federal participants agreed that outcome-related indicators are challenging to develop across multiple agencies with differing missions, but tracking process-related metrics, as modeled by CEQ, is a good place to start.  

Morris acknowledged that CEQ’s June paper is a starting point for the application, expansion, and refinement of federal indicators and metrics as agencies implement their respective climate adaptation plans.

The Pew Charitable Trusts

Partnerships play key role

To help advance resilience nationwide, state and federal partnerships are matching experts on community engagement and policy evaluation with the practitioners leading state resilience initiatives. For instance, CEQ worked with Pew and Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability to cohost a series of workshops in 2022 and 2023 that informed the key performance indicators released in June.

In Washington, state legislation directed the Department of Ecology to compile a climate resilience strategy and tasked the University of Washington Climate Impacts Group with developing metrics. Carlie Stowe, climate resilience specialist from the University of Washington, shared that the group is examining different methods for measuring and evaluating climate resilience to inform the final strategy, which is expected to be released in September.

In another successful partnership, experts at the University of South Carolina leveraged over a decade of research and experience to advise the South Carolina Office of Resilience on its development of  resilience metrics. According to Dr. Susan Cutter, distinguished professor of geography and director of the university’s Hazards Vulnerability and Resilience Institute, states must learn how resilient communities already are to form a baseline for measuring the effectiveness of future actions.

“You need accountability and to have goals, but you also have to know your starting point,” Cutter said, overviewing the Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities approach developed by the University of South Carolina to compare localities, identify potential drivers for community resilience, and monitor improvements. “It needs to be simple … evidence-based, and … scalable from local to regional to national levels. You also need to be able to replicate it over time.”

Using metrics to guide decision-making

In Massachusetts, the development of metrics is integral to assessing progress on state resilience work, said Emily Dahl, deputy director of climate resilience and finance with the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs.

Dahl explained the state’s climate resilience metrics initiative, through which a team of state officials and consultants is developing a new framework and corresponding set of metrics. It is designed to be an iterative and ongoing effort tracking resilience progress on state-led efforts across sectors, centering on environmental justice and equity.

“The metrics are designed to inform updates to the ResilientMass Plan over time,” she explained. “This framework will also inform future funding programs and strategies.”

While the state currently reports agency progress on the ResilientMass Plan, the new climate resilience metrics will provide significantly more detail on how efforts across agencies are advancing resilience. Those metrics will cover areas from reliable transportation infrastructure to keeping businesses’ doors open after a flood or helping people stay cool and avoid negative health impacts during extreme heat events. Dahl said her team is consulting with internal and external stakeholders, including an advisory group of representatives from environmental justice communities and priority populations, to craft the resilience metrics.

The successes and early best practices gleaned from state and federal initiatives can guide new efforts to build partnerships, work across agencies, and engage communities to measure government resilience efforts. With continued emphasis and investment, states and the federal government can further hone resilience solutions and share the tangible impacts these efforts have on policy, processes, communities, and nature—work that is all the more critical given our planet’s rapidly changing climate.

Kristiane Huber works on climate resilience with The Pew Charitable Trusts’ U.S. conservation project.