An Adaptation Plan could be the same as a Hazard Mitigation Plan (HMP) or a Climate Action Plan (CAP), but may not be. A HMP could be absent of climate hazards (or at least not include projections) and a CAP could be focussed solely on mitigation. FEMA's latest guidelines direct local governments to include climate change in their HMPs, but doesn't give specific requirements for doing so. The question is the difference between adaptation plan and HMP. The HMPs are about reducing harm to people from disturbances. Adaptation addresses the full spectrum of negative impacts from climate change, including chronic impacts to secondary human systems (economic, health, infrastructure, etc.) and natural systems.
At the very least, an adaptation process requires the people who will lead the process, the people who will implement it and the people who will be affected by it. Those three groups are not necessarily mutually exclusive but they all need to be participants and ideally co-developers. It is very beneficial to have the a broad range of perspectives and experiences in your process in order to ensure equity issues are addressed and represetion is present. .
The best way to receive updates about future trainings is to join the Climate Smart Communities mailing list. In the meantime, if you’d like to know more about the Steps to Resilience framework, there is a great introduction to the Steps to Resilience on the Climate Resilience Toolkit website.
Understand your community's vulnerabilities then design strategies to reduce those vulnerabilities and increase your ability deliver on services, protect assets (including nature) and provide actionable outcomes.
There are a number of great online resources that share examples of adaptation strategies in action. The Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange and the Climate Resilience Toolkit both have hundreds of case studies that reflect adaptation in practice. The Adaptation Clearinghouse has examples of state and local adaptation policy.
You can apply a "climate lens" or evaluation assessment tool, and integrate it into standard operating procedure--it could become a required or recommended part of the way your organization or agency completes a permitting or financing process. An example of such a tool is the Climate Change Adaptation Certification Tool. This tool asks simple questions to quickly guide users through an evaluation to make a decision about the project’s suitability in the context of climate change risks and helps the user think through modifications needed to address identified risks.
The risk to a given asset is the combined effect of its exposure, or the extent to which it is susceptible to being impacted, and the magnitude of consequence of that exposure, or the extent to which a hazard impacts the health or integrity of the asset. For example, risk of extreme heat exposure to a subsection of a city's population might be evaluated by looking at projections of extreme heat and the number and sensitivity of people or other assets that are potentially exposed to extreme heat events. Evaluating sensitivity could entail identifying populations that may be particularly sensitive to heat such as elderly or infants, identifying housing stock with poor or no climate control, and/or identifying whether there are sufficient cooling centers to assist unhoused persons or those without access to cooling at home.
Assets, or the people, infrastructure, and/or natural resources that your community is concerned about being at risk due to climate change, will vary by community. Resource 2.3 of the Practitioner's Guide, Community Asset Themes, is one tool that can help the practitioner think about the categories of assets that could be relevant for their community.
