Explore a regional climate resilience platform to coordinate initiatives and provide data and resources

Many resilience strategies require coordinated subarea, regional, or statewide action. A regional partnership may be an effective way to ensure coordination of resilience-building activities, policies, advocacy efforts, research needs, and best practices needed to achieve a climate resilient region. Regardless of its ultimate form, this platform can open channels for dialogue, knowledge exchange, and relationship building. Initial efforts to forge such a coalition included the Climate Resilience Resource Group, an ad hoc group that provided feedback to CMAP on development of the Climate Resilience strategy paper, and the Northeastern Illinois Resilience Partnership, which convened after the strategy paper was published to discuss implementation activities.

A sustained regional partnership can also play a role in helping to provide needed climate data and resources and to translate that information for other stakeholders. Regional leaders, from local elected officials to business owners, need up-to-date data on climate science as well as guidance on how to interpret and apply it in their unique contexts. The Illinois Climatologist Office, Illinois State Water Survey, Midwestern Regional Climate Center, and other entities provide high quality historical and projected climate data and climate monitoring. Many stakeholders, however, do not know about these resources or may not understand how data on precipitation or temperature changes can be applied to decision making. CMAP, in partnership with these and other institutions, can play a role in translating climate science to policy making and planning. The agency’s work on climate resilience and related impacts has resulted in new regional data about land surface temperature, social vulnerabilities to climate change, and areas susceptible to flooding, which can be shared and incorporated into planning processes.