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Statewide Climate Resilience Landscape Analysis
Resilient Cities Catalyst (RCC), through the California Resilience Partnership (CRP), recently received a grant from The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation to conduct a statewide analysis on funding and governance gaps and opportunities for climate resilience in regions across California. Working with Farallon Strategies and CivicWell (formerly Local Government Commission), we are conducting this research through early 2022 and will be producing a final report in mid-2022.
The impetus for our work is the historic 2021 budget to support climate resilience adopted this past fall. The Legislature and Governor Newsom responded to California’s significant climate change impacts by allocating $3.7 billion for climate resilience (and $15 billion for climate overall), and the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR) received $275 million to distribute from 2022-2025 to support local and regional climate resilience planning. OPR’s grant programs are a critical piece of regional and local capacity building, and should begin providing funding in 2022 for agencies, organizations, and municipalities spearheading climate mitigation and adaptation across the state. Our goal in conducting this analysis is to provide insights that have the potential to inform OPR’s program and highlight where opportunities exist to make the greatest impact through their grant programs.
This Landscape Analysis builds upon a sequence of budget alignment stakeholder conversations and research conducted over the summer of 2021. A resulting analysis explores perspectives on funding priorities that would maximize the impact of this allocation.
The State’s commitment to climate resilience is an opportunity to identify gaps in governance and funding structures, across each of California’s regions, and augment existing capacity to make communities climate resilient. Our analysis will include an overview of needs and capacities across the State’s regions, and we want to ensure local organizations and perspectives are included in our study.
If this study is relevant to your work, we welcome the opportunity to engage with you over the course of the next couple months to discuss the region’s needs and identify areas of collaboration.
