Climate Action Planning & Resilience Planning
Community Story: Tremont process
In Tremont, Maine, the town passed a resolution stating a Climate Emergency in May 2019. This resolution urged the town to proactively plan to address climate change. In 2022, Tremont applied for a Community Action Grant through the Maine Community Resilience Partnership to fund the development of a Tremont Community Resilience Plan. A prior grant had funded the completion of a town greenhouse gas inventory and the completion of a vulnerability assessment was also included in the 2022 grant. While the town was also completing an update to the Comprehensive Plan, they saw the creation of a detailed and focused resilience plan as an important tool to provide more space to dive deeper into the pressing issue of resilience with targeting actions steps. Throughout the planning process, a focus was ensuring that the plan complemented the Comprehensive Plan.
When the grant was awarded, Tremont partnered with A Climate to Thrive to implement the planning process, to be informed by the vulnerability assessment which would be completed by the Gulf of Maine Research Institute. ACTT developed a planning process that would ensure that the plan was maximally informed by town residents. Planning began with listening sessions and additional pathways for feedback at the local library, town events, and online. Through these various outreach pathways, information was collected about local priorities, challenges, and opportunities as well as specific ideas for the town.
The feedback collected was then integrated with research into top resilience strategies that aligned with the local priorities, challenges, opportunities, and ideas. Strong emphasis was placed on keeping the plan concise, accessible, and actionable. The plan draft focused on near-term goals with a high level of specificity and longer-term goals with broader strokes. An implementation guide was developed to accompany the plan, providing details around funding, technical resources, and existing examples of each action step to ease implementation.
The plan draft was shared through a second series of community engagement shaped similarly to the first. The town distributed mailers letting residents know about the plan and opportunities to provide feedback. Many champions came together to usher the plan across the finish line: an official town vote in May 2024 at which only one “nay” was expressed.
The plan is now being implemented by the town and is the focus of the Tremont Sustainability Committee and partnering, supporting organizations like A Climate to Thrive. You can find the Tremont Community Resilience Plan online here.
Project Description
Climate Action Planning and Resilience Planning are two complementary processes, with some important distinctions, that municipalities can use to address the impacts of climate change.
Climate Action Planning focuses on mitigation, with the primary goal of decreasing emissions to reduce future climate change impacts. CAP strategies are generally focused on reducing a community’s contribution to climate change through energy efficiency, renewable energy, sustainable transportation, and other measures that cut emissions. Climate Action Plans can also include adaptation, or actions taken to build the resilience of a community to projected future climate-related impacts. Mitigation and adaptation can have many important intersections, and a Climate Action Plan can be a good pathway to highlight those intersections.
Resilience Planning, on the other hand, focuses solely on adaptation—responding to the climate impacts that are already occurring and preparing for those that are expected to intensify. While resilience planning can include strategies for decreasing emissions, adaptation and resilience-building is the primary focus, encompassing a range of measures that improve a community's ability to withstand and recover from climate change-related impacts, such as extreme weather events, rising sea levels, or infrastructure vulnerability.
Why This Project Matters
Both Climate Action Planning and Resilience Planning play a crucial role in creating a sustainable, climate-responsive community.
A researched plan that aligns with local priorities, challenges, and opportunities helps a town focus on priority and high impact activities. This is essential, as towns often have limited resources and need to be sure that action is impactful and aligns with resident priorities.
A researched plan can help the town access funding, as project areas are clearly defined, demonstrated to align with local priorities, and the town can refer to the plan in making funding requests.
If the planning process is conducted in a community-driven manner, engagement and understanding will be cultivated, often adding to the town’s capacity for implementation of its resulting plan. Integrated climate action and resilience planning at the local level creates an opportunity for community members to contribute their knowledge of the community, ensuring that strategies reflect the unique context and priorities of the town.
Climate Action Planning helps a town prioritize top-level and most impactful actions aimed at both reducing local contribution to climate change and protecting the town from climate-related impacts.
Resilience Planning enables communities to adapt to climate impacts that are already happening and will continue to increase in frequency and severity. With an integrated resilience plan, towns can focus on strategies for disaster preparedness, infrastructure protection, and public health in the face of changing climate conditions.
Key considerations:
Community readiness
To successfully implement a Resilience Plan, your group should ideally have some history with the town and trust within the community. It’s important that the community feels comfortable with the group, as this trust will be essential for engaging in open discussions and fostering collaboration.
It's beneficial if your group has already participated in some collaborative efforts or has existing relationships with key stakeholders. You will need people to support the project, so laying this groundwork early on is important.
Start by looking at the climate impacts already felt in your community. Use this as a basis for the conversation, allowing you to build a shared understanding of the local context before diving into the planning process. This approach ensures the plan is relevant and responsive to current needs.
Community knowledge is crucial. While you don’t need to be in a place where everyone is already talking about climate, you will need a solid core group of individuals who are committed to this work and able to bring others along.
Cost
If you have a committed volunteer committee with the skills and time to dedicate to the planning process, you can minimize costs, though it may take longer to complete the plan. For example, the Bar Harbor Climate Emergency Task Force wrote the Bar Harbor Climate Action Plan.
A budget will be necessary for the community engagement process, as meaningful participation requires outreach, materials, and potentially facilitation support. Food and childcare can go a long way to making outreach events more accessible.
If you decide to hire a consultant to facilitate the planning process, higher funds will be needed. Please see the section below on working with a consultant.
Consider a hybrid model that collaborates with a university, engaging graduate or undergraduate students to assist in research and analysis can be an effective way to lower costs while also tapping into academic expertise.
Time Requirement
Community involvement will require additional time, particularly when gathering feedback and incorporating revisions. Engaging the community deeply will lead to a more robust plan, but it will also take longer to ensure all voices are heard and incorporated.
Be prepared for ongoing outreach to keep people engaged and ensure their input is reflected in the plan.
People Power
Building a strong team with both internal capacity (volunteers and local stakeholders with a strong background in local knowledge) and external support (people with the technical expertise and climate knowledge to help fuel action items and implementation guidance) is key.
For smaller communities or those with fewer resources, leveraging volunteers with expertise and time can make the process more affordable. However, you will need a dedicated team of individuals who can drive the project forward, communicate with the community, and manage the logistics of the planning process.
Working With a Consultant?
If you decide to work with a consultant on your town’s plan, be sure to select the consultant carefully. When writing the request for proposals, incorporate specific language emphasizing the importance of a community-driven planning process. Spend time in the interview process focused on how the consultant will prioritize community feedback and leadership. Ensure that the contract is established with the understanding that the consultant is working for the community and the community is leading the process. Emphasize taking time to listen to diverse perspectives and incorporating those perspectives into the plan.
Climate Action or Resilience Plans vs. Comprehensive Plans
Comprehensive plans are important plans that are required by the state and that establish broad goals for the town. Comprehensive plans are typically written and updated in ABOUT ten year cycles and are intentionally broad in scope. Climate action or Resilience plans are an opportunity to dive deeper into the specific areas of climate mitigation and/or resilience with more specificity in action items and deliverables towards goals. However, the ideal scenario is for climate action to be incorporated into the comprehensive plan and the comprehensive plan can point to climate action and/or resilience plans for higher specificity.
Can I just copy existing Climate Action or Resilience Plans from other Communities?
Many excellent climate action and resilience plans exist and your community should absolutely turn to these plans as opposed to reinventing the wheel. It is critical to take the time to ensure that these plans are shaped to best align with specific local circumstances, however, and this is often best done through community engagement. You might start with a template plan harvested from another community and edit that plan through community engagement, thereby ensuring the plan fits with local priorities, challenges, and opportunities and that you build community understanding and support for the plan in the process.
Planning takes a lot of time. Shouldn’t I just jump into action?
With the urgency of addressing climate change, both in terms of mitigation and adaptation, it is understandable that many people feel impatient with planning processes. While plans can bring significant benefits to a local community - clarity of focus, unity behind next steps, opening funding opportunities - it is important not to get bogged down in only planning. You do not have to wait for a plan to take action. As you plan, you will start to identify priority next steps, and action can begin on those next steps while you are engaged in the planning process. Or, a specific project can get started simultaneously to the planning process. Checking in consistently to make sure you are not stuck in a planning cycle or that planning is taking more time than it needs is very important.
How to:
Assess your starting point:
If your community already has a climate action or resilience plan, start by reviewing it to see what can be added or expanded. Look for gaps or areas where resilience strategies could be integrated.
Consider hosting a listening session with community members to hear their concerns, hopes, and ideas. This will help identify what might be missing and give you a clearer idea of what the community values.
If your town doesn't have a plan yet
Begin by looking for examples of existing plans that feel like a good fit for your community. Consider how you might like to shape those plans to fit more specifically with the community.
Gather relevant information to help establish concrete goals. Two tools you might consider to gather this information are included below
Greenhouse Gas Inventory (GHG): This provides a baseline of emissions data, which is crucial for identifying reduction opportunities. However, the State of Maine shared emissions data for the state as whole, and this data can be a great place to turn to understand how emissions are concentrated in the state.
Vulnerability Assessment: Even if this isn’t highly detailed, having an idea of how climate change is already affecting or will affect your community will guide your resilience strategies.
Engage the Community Early
Hold a community meeting to hear directly from residents about their concerns, hopes, and priorities. This ensures that the community is involved from the start and helps you tailor strategies that align with community needs. You might start this engagement with a template of a plan harvested from another community, or you might state with a blank slate. It can be good to start with a blank slate, so that community members are not influenced in their early feedback.
After the initial engagement, you can begin to draft approaches. Aim for a bare minimum draft—just enough to give people something concrete to respond to. This could be a high-level outline of strategies that you plan to pursue. Again, you might harvest this high-level outline from another community.
Conduct additional engagement to collect feedback on the high-level outline, if you have not already done so in the first engagement steps. Use this engagement to shape more robust drafting.
Draft the Plan
Create a draft that organizes the plan into action areas with clear goals and pathways to achieve those goals. Make sure the plan is clear, concise, and easy for the community to read and understand. The document should not be overwhelming but should provide enough detail to guide future work.
As you recommend strategies, check for potential funding sources. Ensure that there are clear paths for financing or supporting the strategies you’re suggesting. Provide as much information to help guide implementation as possible. You might consider developing a separate implementation guide to keep the plan short and accessible.
Make sure to keep the community involved and updated in this process.
Plan Review and Adoption
The writing of the plan itself doesn’t take too long, but ensuring it’s inclusive and well-received requires time and careful engagement.
Some towns might use the plan as a final document that the selectboard votes to adopt or that the whole town votes to adopt. If so, make sure it’s ready for a public vote or discussion at a town meeting. Many towns have town meetings in the summer, so timing is important.
If the plan is voted down, it doesn’t mean it’s the end. You can still use it as an internal guiding document for sustainability efforts. Consider making revisions and trying again at the next vote.
If the plan passes, be ready to pivot to implementation quickly so that you do not lose momentum. Be sure to celebrate early victories. Having a few quick wins—visible actions that show progress—will help build momentum and support for continued efforts.
Monitoring and Accountability
Keep the plan dynamic. You can update it every 5 years, but it’s important to ensure ongoing accountability.
Consider holding an annual public session to update the community on progress, share successes, and discuss areas for improvement while also outlining ways to get involved with implementation. This keeps the community engaged and reinforces that the plan is being actively implemented.