Climate Ready Communities Announcement
In an effort to help local leaders build climate resilience at an affordable cost, the Geos Institute announced its Climate Ready CommunitiesSM program at the 2017 ICMA annual conference in San Antonio, TX on Oct 22, 2017.
Our goal for this new program is to ensure that communities of all sizes in the US and Canada have effective climate resilience programs in place to protect their people, natural resources, infrastructure, and culture. This means solving the affordability challenge in climate resilience planning.
The Climate Ready Communities program will include a free, comprehensive Practical Guide to Building Resilience. This Guide is based on 10 years of experience helping communities understand and adapt to changing climate conditions, and our proven Whole Community framework.
This framework uses a cross-sector, multi-stakeholder approach that is adaptive over time and creates multiple benefits across the community. Communities can use this framework to develop a climate resilience plan and strengthen local adaptive capacity.
In addition to the Guide, the Climate Ready Communities program includes a companion subscription service to provide support to local leaders as they move through the seven steps in the Guide, as well as several add-on services, such as local climate projections, additional blocks of consulting time, and on-site facilitation.
Here are recent comments by two of our pre-beta reviewers:
“The Climate Ready Communities program is off to a great start. I was one of the Pre-beta reviewers for this program in Sept 2017, and was impressed by the breadth and detail of the information provided in the Guide. The Geos Institute’s Whole Community climate resilience framework provides a systems approach that a community can actually use and the Guide covers a range of useful topics from community engagement to developing a task force. The tutorials, templates and website will help a community like ours navigate the resilience building process.”
Dena Winslow, tribal planner and grant writer, Aroostook Band of MicMacs, Presque Isle, ME
“We were excited to participate in the pre-beta review of the Climate Ready Communities program, given the great experience we had working with the Geos Institute on our initial climate resilience planning several years ago. We had a team from my non-profit organization, the city, and county do the review, and we felt the program material was on track to be very useful for communities like ours. Their comprehensive approach shows that they really understand what it is like to do this work in the real world and the templates and tutorials in their subscription service make their 7 Step climate resilience framework accessible for local government and partners.”
Amy Cilimburg, Executive Director, Climate Smart Missoula
The commercial pilot phase of this new program begins in late March, 2018. Geos Institute is accepting applications now through February 28, 2018 to be one of the 15 communities in this pilot program.
For more information on the subscription service and pilot program, and to access a beta version of the Practical Guide to Building Resilience, please visit
And for information on the add-on services, please visit