We believe that resilience and adaptation work require the ability to lead when called, to follow when necessary, and to be radically open to new ideas, perspectives, and possible outcomes.
CAP’s service in climate adaptation planning includes Capacity Building for Teams, Climate Adaptation Roadmaps, Change Management for Climate Integration, Design Firm Liaison, Financing/Funding Mapping, Mitigation and Adaptation Alignment, Peer Review, Resilience Strategy Development, Stakeholder Mapping, Strategic Guidance on Investment Prioritization, Vulnerability Analyses, and Workshop Facilitation.
In early 2023, the Greater New Orleans Foundation (GNOF) announced the Next 100 Years Challenge competition in celebration of the organization’s centennial year. The competition was designed to inspire and attract plans for community-centered and cost-effective infrastructure improvements, including nature-based solutions, in 13 parishes of Southeast Louisiana. GNOF partnered with CAP to structure and ground the competition process and develop the Next100 Community of Practice (CoP), the collaborative platform that would organize the work of the grantees. CAP helped define the parameters of the technical assistance (TA) framework, and identify potential funding, finance, and grant opportunities aligned with TA areas through intensive framing and TA provider workshops. After grantees were identified, CAP continued to support the Next100 CoP through development and participation of grantee workshops and coaching sessions.In early February of 2022, ULI New York and the ULI Urban Resilience Team engaged CAP to assist in the development and implementation of a technical assistance workshop with the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) to focus on innovative cloudburst infrastructure to protect against future extreme rainfall events while providing opportunities for passive and active recreation during everyday conditions. NYCHA intends to expand this type of approach as it seeks to manage its stormwater. CAP, with a panel of local and international engineers and planners, characterized NYCHA’s opportunities for cloudburst management with three interrelated approaches to slow down the water, store it temporarily, and restore NYCHA’s landscapes. Drawing from established best practices, these principles form an interconnected system that interrupts the speed of stormwater runoff, that holds water where it falls, and that creates restorative landscapes that improve stormwater management while enlivening places for people. CAP then led the report preparation.In the summer of 2020, Climate Adaptation Partners and the Carolinas Integrated Sciences Assessment Team initiated a heat research program inclusive of a tri-partite research design to study personal biometrics, wet bulb globe temperature, and heat index in the City of Charleston in partnership with NOAA. This program continued in 2022 with targeted research with the Charleston Housing Authority ahead of its planned redevelopment program. These efforts parallel MUSC physician-led research on retrospective and prospective patient impacts from extreme heat and coincide with planned municipal investments in housing, water management, and transportation. The research identified areas of extensive heat stress in order to improve investment decision-making ahead of the redevelopment, with results directly impacting the lived experiences of residents.The 2022 Houston Neighborhood Resilience Districts project engages typically under-served, flood prone, Houston communities in a pilot program to build community capacity while prioritizing resilience investments based on community priorities within the city’s ongoing post-Hurricane Harvey recovery effort. As part of a multidisciplinary team led by One Architecture and Urbanism, CAP led efforts related to resilience implementation, quality control, and city-wide replicability. This data-driven effort included input from multiple technical working groups as well as stakeholder groups. The project helps target communities build awareness of their climate change risks and to co-create resilient strategies for each district’s unique needs. CAP’s expert guidance draws from a “Water AND” approach that addresses Houston’s climate and other hazards along with the many opportunities that emerge when considering mitigation and adaptation pathways.In late 2019, CAP’s founding partner, Janice Barnes, was selected by NYC Mayor DeBlasio to serve as a panel member on the 4th Assessment of the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC4) and to co-chair the assessment’s Health Working Group. Following development of the health chapter, CAP transitioned to a stewardship role for the production and publication of the whole of the 4th assessment and it’s nine chapters. Working closely with the NPCC Panel Co-Chairs, CAP created a Microsoft SharePoint/Teams project site to unify and structure the work of the NPCC’s 80+ scientists, researchers, and policy makers. CAP’s role included meeting coordination/hosting, editorial and graphic design, and GIS support for all six working groups, and publication coordination with the New York Academy of Sciences. CAP was also tasked with the creation of an independent, custom NPCC website (working with B. Martin Studio) to memorialize the NPCC assessment process. NPCC4 was officially released on Earth Day 2024.
Developed by CAP in 2019, the Awareness, Coping, Mitigation, and Adaptation Model (ACMA) introduces a nested scales approach to risk reduction. The key premise is the elimination of traditional linearity in solution-making, instead focusing on multiple parallel processes, nested across scales of actors and systems, visualized and monitored for uptake and risk reduction progress.
After a relatively quiet period of weather-related events in the 1990’s and 2000’s, the state of South Carolina was hit with a series of damaging storm-related natural disasters in 2015 (historic rainfall event), 2016 (Hurricane Matthew), 2017 (Hurricane Irma), 2018 (Hurricane Florence), 2019 (Hurricane Dorian), and 2020 (storm and tornado events). The federally-declared disaster declarations resulting from these events brought over $1 billion in federal disaster assistance to South Carolina, through flood insurance claims, public assistance grants, hazard mitigation assistance, and infrastructure funding. With the influx of federal disaster funding coming to South Carolina and increased interest in Nature-Based Solutions (NBS), the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) collaborated with Climate Adaptation Partners (CAP) to conduct a research project to understand the distribution of federal disaster funding in South Carolina from 2015 to 2021, the barriers that exist for state agencies to allocate the funding and/or local jurisdictions to utilize the funding, and what, if any, funds have been spent on nature-based projects. The outputs of the final report were used by TNC to create a dashboard and storymap to further illustrate the recovery funding landscape in the state.
In 2024, CAP was retained by The Nature Conservancy to update and expand the study to cover additional funding sources and programs. The updated was concluded in early 2025.
The Charleston Medical District, which includes the Medical University of South Carolina, the Veteran’s Administration Hospital and Roper Children’s’ Hospital, retained Climate Adaptation Partners to develop and facilitate a series of technical charrettes on water, transportation, and heat geared toward raising mutual awareness of efforts, identifying opportunities for improved coordination and risk reduction, and connecting the various organizations working in parallel on common range of vulnerabilities in the Lockwood Corridor area of the Medical District.The recently completed Charleston Vulnerability Assessment suggests a tripling of the number of extreme heat days within the century and identifies Extreme Heat as a significant risk to Charlestonians. NOAA and other organizations continue to escalate the alarm on the health risks associated with extreme heat as heat-related illness and fatalities far outpace fatalities from hurricanes or pluvial flooding per the CDC. Unfortunately, heat risk is not well understood or well-integrated into planned investments in Charleston. Based on a pilot project to analyze surface temperatures in the CMD, CAP is coordinating two efforts with NOAA / CAPA Strategies and the Carolinas Integrated Sciences and Assessments (CISA) to more fully understand Charleston’s vulnerability to urban heat.In 2019, the New York City Mayor’s Office of Resiliency and HR&A retained CAP as expert reviewer, working closely with the overall team, to refine and extend the analyses and provide formal peer review to improve the overall process of the development of the City’s Climate Adaptation Roadmap. Drawing from the New York City Panel on Climate Change, updated vulnerability analyses and significant stakeholder advisory group engagement, the Roadmap will cover all five boroughs of the city. With its +520 miles of coastline and wide ranges of exposures, the relationship between the NPCC climate projections, the vulnerabilities stemming from those projections, and the possible situational typologies across the boroughs is a central aspect to the work. CAP is conducting this work in concert with One Architecture and Urbanism.
CAP was retained by ONE Architecture and Urbanism to join a multidisciplinary team as part of Resilience by Design Amsterdam Metropolitan Area. The project, spearheaded by MRA Climate-Proof, focuses on how investment decisions in MRA developments can be climate-adaptive. The team’s approach looks beyond traditional water management approaches to escape established silos to better address societal issues. While extreme heat has historically been underestimated in regions with perceived temperate climates, CAP helped provide a more nuanced and robust understanding of extreme heat and its cascading impacts as a necessary component, along with other vulnerabilities, in a “waterAND” approach to adaptation planning. [image by ONE]In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, Enterprise Community Partners (ECP) asked Janice to serve as a Senior Advisor to ECP, the University of Puerto Rico Architecture and Planning School, and the Builders Association of Puerto Rico on the development of a guide, Keep Safe: A guide for resilient housing design in island communities, to assist homeowners who had been recently devastated by the storm to rebuild with affordable, safe, resilient, and equitable strategies. This team of 50+ experts from Puerto Rico and the mainland provided critical input to the development of the guide. Central to this effort was understanding the projected climate scenarios for Puerto Rico and how hazards, risks and associated vulnerabilities impact rebuilding efforts. Janice was also Senior Advisor to ResilientSEE™ on the development Communities Together, a complementary guide to Keep Safe, focusing on the development of Resilient Community Centers, a foundational need in an area that will be long-term recovering.The Tel Aviv-Yafo Accelerator, a partnership between the Columbia University Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes, 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) and The Porter School of Environmental Studies at Tel Aviv University leveraged the expertise of investors, researchers, designers, and others to address extreme heat in Tel Aviv’s Shapira community. While the region’s environment is becoming hotter and dryer due to climate change, the community is also experiencing rapid population grown and demographic shifts all within a dense urban context. CAP was invited to participate as an Expert Facilitator and external reviewer with a focus on urban heat and health. Activities included workshop facilitation and site-based activities to assist community members, municipal leads and other partners in developing understanding and consensus.
