Climate changes and associated impacts are placing pressure on institutions and the professionals working within them to become proactive and to plan for more extreme impacts in distant futures. Despite a growing recognition of the need for climate adaptation action, there are limited assessment frameworks and strategic evaluation resources to support our understanding of regional adaptive capacity. We build on the literature and on information provided by climate adaptation experts to design a multi-criterion framework called the Regional Fingerprint. This framework consists of five critical categories - adopted actions, institutional capacity, research quality, planning processes, and regional collaboration - and twenty-one evaluation criteria. The framework is designed to uncover asymmetries between places, identify opportunities for intervention, and track progress in adaptive capacity. We further applied this framework to regions in California to test its viability and glean insights into the framework's capacity to generate new and useful policy relevant information. Through this work we find that the Regional Fingerprint offers insights into adaptive capacity and can be used to highlight critical areas for strategic intervention by state and local planners.
Hirschfeld, D; Hill, KE; Riordan, B
The regional fingerprint: A new tool to evaluate adaptive capacity
Environmental Science & Policy