Poster #7 - A Just Pathway Toward Climate Resilience: Building Local Communities’ Adaptive Capacity through a State-level Funding Program

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

Effective policies are critical to help local communities build resilience against climate hazards. However, communities often encounter obstacles such as insufficient funding, misguided policies, and technical deficiencies that impede resilience planning and development. State-level funding programs have the potential to address these obstacles, but the equity and efficacy of such programs are questionable. These programs may inadvertently perpetuate injustices if they fail to allocate resources equitably through accommodating the underlying physical, environmental, socio-economic, and health conditions at the local level. Moreover, state-sponsored programs may not be effective if vulnerable communities within the state are unable to leverage the resources available to strengthen their capacities. Using data collected from the state of North Carolina’s Resilient Coastal Communities Program (RCCP) introduced in 2021, we investigate how such state-level funding programs can contribute to the adaptive capacity of local coastal communities toward effective and equitable resilience-building by exploring the relationship between communities’ vulnerability levels and the outputs local communities produce through the program. Through Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression, we found that North Carolina counties that are more vulnerable receive greater amounts of state grant monies for resilience planning. Positive beta coefficients are found between levels of physical, socio-economic, and health vulnerabilities for a county and the amount of grant monies received from the state. Despite that, while a state-level funding program can offer financial support towards resilience planning, many vulnerable communities remain under-resourced for implementation. Those communities might also struggle to translate the funding into all adaptive capacities that build climate resilience. This underscores the need for state-level funding programs to account for pre-existing physical, social, economic, and environmental injustices and offer local communities guidance to strengthen necessary resources and capacities to fill the implementation gap.

Author

• Zixin (Finnie) Zhao, Duke University
  Presenting Author