UNC Asheville’s NEMAC has been actively engaged in the resilience field since 2014, from collaborating with NOAA’s Climate Program Office in developing the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit and its Steps to Resilience framework to the application of that framework with different communities at multiple scales. In doing so, NEMAC has learned valuable lessons about process, engagement, and application — and how they ultimately contribute to a successful resilience plan.

During this presentation, we will outline the similarities and differences that arise in developing local municipal and regional resilience plans using case studies from Asheville, West Palm Beach, and North Carolina’s Triangle region. Focusing on the shared metrics of success, we highlight the importance of a customized vulnerability and risk assessment and show how facilitated interactions are crucial to the development of strategies and a shared vision of resilience.

Addressing coastal issues under climate change requires the engagement of scientists, decision-makers, and citizens utilizing all of the technical, cultural, and political knowledge at their disposal to develop solutions for complex problems. The inclusion of coastal residents provides more comprehensive, substantive policy decisions. Our Coastal Future Forum seeks to learn more about utilizing the method of deliberative discussion to engage residents of coastal South Carolina with natural resource managers, government officials, and scientists to develop policy responses to coastal challenges of protecting environmental health, preserving biodiversity, conserving marine resources, and planning for wise use of energy and sand resources. Research objectives include learning more about how issues are prioritized in an inclusive process, analyzing differences in public opinion on these issues and comparing opinions from the deliberative process with statewide and national knowledge and beliefs.

A survey was administered to South Carolina coastal residents to gauge their opinions on environmental issues. Respondents to the coastal survey were also given the opportunity to attend a two and a half- day forum in North Charleston to learn about and discuss the topics relating to climate resilience. During the forum, 80 participants heard talks by expert-scientists, then formed small groups to engage in facilitated deliberative discussion of the issues and potential policy solutions. At the conclusion of the forum, the participants provided a summary of their small-group discussions to the entire forum and completed a post-forum survey with questions similar to the initial survey. Results from this project will provide a better understanding of deliberative discussion as a method of natural resource decision- making and how the public perceives and prioritizes issues related to climate resilience. This talk will focus on the perception of environmental health risks to coastal S.C. residents and how cultural worldview and deliberation might change it. Analysis for this project was conducted using survey and transcript data from the forum to determine the perception of environmental health risks in coastal residents and the cultural significance associated with those risks, respectively.

Research for this project was supported by the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine under award number 200007353.

The team at UNC Asheville’s NEMAC is working with multiple municipalities, counties, and regional councils of government in the Carolinas and beyond to facilitate and guide them through the climate resilience planning process.

In facilitating these processes, we create all of our communication materials from scratch—but we rely on “recipes” that we’ve developed over the past several years that, when taken together, result in a virtual Climate Resilience Communications Cookbook.

Like cooking recipes, these tested techniques and strategies guide us as we create workshop presentations, design documents and reports, develop print materials, and facilitate workflows that are customized to fit the tastes of each client.

Using examples from four different clients (and groups of clients) working through the resilience planning process at different scales and with different foci, NEMAC’s Lead Science Editor and Principal Designer will describe lessons learned as we developed the recipes to communicate both qualitative and quantitative results from vulnerability and risk analyses, all driving toward the development and prioritization of resilience-building options. Application of the recipes results in products that our clients can easily digest . . . and that lead to real resilience results.