As communities in California experience more frequent, prolonged, and severe impacts of climate change, many are faced with planning for and responding to ongoing and worsening hazards such as extreme heat, flooding, wildfires, drought, extreme weather events, and sea level rise. Furthermore, many jurisdictions lack the capacity, tools, guidance, and resources to effectively prepare for these climate impacts. This capacity gap hinders the ability of communities to develop and implement plans that build resilience and reduce future risk.

The Adaptation Planning Grant Program (APGP) is designed to fill local, regional, and tribal planning needs, provide communities the resources to identify climate resilience priorities, and support the development of a pipeline of climate resilient infrastructure projects across the state.

Key Priorities

  • Explicitly and meaningfully prioritize equitable outcomes, particularly in the most vulnerable communities, by establishing an inclusive funding program that removes barriers for Applicants and ensures that awardees represent a wide geographic, economic, and population diversity.
  • Encourage communities to equitably plan for and respond to multiple climate risks by centering the needs of vulnerable communities and supporting an all-risk approach to adaptation planning. These grants encourage communities to conduct integrated planning activities. As California experiences accelerated impacts of climate change, many communities are faced with planning for and responding to cascading and compound impacts (e.g., flooding and landslides following wildfires, or riverine flooding due to sea level rise).
  • Support integrated social and physical infrastructure planning to achieve community resilience. The program provides flexible funding to meet multi-sector/issue planning needs that intersect with climate risks, including but not limited to land use, transportation, economic, housing, natural resource management, public infrastructure, and hazard mitigation issues.
  • Build statewide capacity to plan for and implement equitable planning strategies by supporting peer-to-peer learning, communities of practice, information sharing, and publishing replicable case studies in the State Adaptation Clearinghouse.
  • Embed equity into the planning process, from project visioning through project evaluation, by increasing opportunities for shared decision-making, utilizing inclusive processes, and actively remedying historic underinvestment by fairly distributing access to the benefits and privileges associated with community investment.

For More Information

Abby Edwards
Abby Edwards is the Integrated Climate Adaptation and Resiliency Program’s Adaptation Planning Grant Program Manager.