“Meeting the challenges of a changing climate
The U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit provides scientific tools, information, and expertise to help people manage their climate-related risks and opportunities, and improve their resilience to extreme events. The site is designed to serve interested citizens, communities, businesses, resource managers, planners, and policy leaders at all levels of government.
A climate-smart approach to taking action
In response to the President’s Climate Action Plan and Executive Order to help the nation prepare for climate-related changes and impacts, U.S. federal government agencies gathered resources that can help people take action to build their climate resilience. The impacts of climate change—including higher temperatures, heavier downpours, more frequent and intense droughts, wildfires, and floods, and sea level rise—are affecting communities, businesses, and natural resources across the nation.
Now is the time to act. For some, taking a business-as-usual approach has become more risky than taking steps to build their climate resilience. People who recognize they are vulnerable to climate variability and change can work to reduce their vulnerabilities, and find win-win opportunities that simultaneously boost local economies, create new jobs, and improve the health of ecosystems. This is a climate-smart approach—investing in activities that build resilience and capacity while reducing risk.
What’s in the Toolkit? How can it help?
Using plain language, the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit helps people face climate problems and find climate opportunities. The site offers:
- Steps to Resilience—a five-step process you can follow to initiate, plan, and implement projects to become more resilient to climate-related hazards.
- Taking Action stories—real-world case studies describing climate-related risks and opportunities that communities and businesses face, steps they’re taking to plan and respond, and tools and techniques they’re using to improve resilience.
- A catalog of freely available Tools for accessing and analyzing climate data, generating visualizations, exploring climate projections, estimating hazards, and engaging stakeholders in resilience-building efforts.
- Climate Explorer—a visualization tool that offers maps of climate stressors and impacts as well as interactive graphs showing daily observations and long-term averages from thousands of weather stations.
- Topic narratives that explain how climate variability and change can impact particular regions of the country and sectors of society.
- Pointers to free, federally developed training courses that can build skills for using climate tools and data.
- Maps highlighting the locations of centers where federal and state agencies can provide regional climate information.
- The ability to Search the entire federal government’s climate science domain and filter results according to your interests.”