Part 2 Climate adaptation is an issue that is fundamentally about land-use in vulnerable areas, necessitating an understanding of local context, beliefs, values, and history. Adaptation policy needs to be able to engage with and respond to local level stakeholders and the place-specific climate issues they face. Managed retreat, and adaptation more broadly, is most successful when there is sustained community engagement, strong local leadership, and community organization to facilitate a bottom-up planning process, and sufficient government capacity to support the adaptation planning process. These ingredients can lead to the creation of proactive adaptation strategies that will foster equitable climate resiliency for communities in the U.S. Policy related to adaptation can be broken into two parts: planning and implementation. The planning process is critically important to the success of climate change adaptation, especially when aiming for a proactive adaptation strategy rather than a reactive, post-hoc one. In this section, we explore how we can translate best practices and lessons from the study of managed retreat barriers in Part 1 of this report into tangible policy solutions for proactive adaptation planning.
I. Adaptation Planning Policy: Getting it Right Summary: Robust adaptation planning should consider information gaps as well as psychological, financial, and institutional barriers. Equity considerations and community needs should be incorporated into early stages of adaptation planning through demand-driven research, so that adaptation decisions use the best available science and address barriers that prevent communities from taking action. Adaptation planning policy will need to be designed in a way that allows for evaluation and dissemination of learning so that adaptation remains responsive to the needs of communities.
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