Compilation of U.S. City Climate Adaptation Plans

This document presents a compilation of climate adaptation plans from cities with a population larger a population larger than 300,000 in 2019 according to the U.S. Census Bureau City and Town Population Totals between 2010 and 2019. In addition, we also included the most populated city for each U.S. State to ensure every U.S. State was represented in our assessment. This search was completed by May 2020.

For each of the 87 cities assessed, but we found only 48 cities that had a standalone climate adaptation plan (or climate assessment report) published before May 2020. 5 out of 48 plans were county-level plans. 1 out of 48 is a regional-level plan.

For the 48 cities, we collected information about whether the city’s local government has published an adaptation plan. We used the pattern “city of XXXX climate adaptation plan” as a keyword, replacing the XXXX symbols with the name of the city, in a Google-based search. We also substituted the word “adaptation” with “resilience” to account for commonly used terms in the climate adaptation and resilience field. We complemented the search by individually looking for climate adaptation plans published in the local government website under the Sustainability or Environment office and also the Georgetown Climate Center database. This search also revealed climatic assessments or action plans for some cities. For our analysis, an adaptation plan differs from an action plan in that the former includes sector-targeted strategies to adapt the dynamic city environment to changing climate conditions, while the latter’s focus is to mitigate greenhouse gases emissions. We considered climate assessment reports as an adaptation plan because these contain information that is intended for decision-making. It is often the case that there is little difference between these two document types (adaptation plans and assessment reports), however, we identified 3 categories: 1) Adaptation plan only, 2) Assessment report only, 3) Adaptation plan and assessment report. As mentioned above, adaptation plans include a list of actions or strategies that the city is planning given changing climate conditions. Information about changing climate conditions come from assessment reports commissioned by the local government or other national and international reports. An assessment report lists the changes in climate variables at the city location and often also include a vulnerability analysis, however, no specific actions are recommended. Finally, an adaptation plan can also include a detailed assessment of the observed and future changes in climate variables at the city.