Ready-to-Fund Resilience Toolkit

The “Ready-to-Fund Resilience” toolkit, published in March 2022, is designed to help local government staff and their technical assistance providers better understand and prepare to receive funding and financing opportunities for climate resilience, and to create equity through these opportunities as well. The toolkit is a self-guided resource intended specifically for small- and-mid-sized local government practitioners working on resilience or department leads with power over, and a stake in, climate resilience funding and finance, and organizations and government bodies with the capacity and jurisdiction to support local government climate resilience funding and finance through policy, resources, technical assistance, partnerships, or process change.

The toolkit describes how local government leads and partners can design more fundable resilience projects by pulling specific policy levers, seeking key partnerships, using innovative accounting practices, inverting power structures, and rethinking and redesigning internal processes. It is intended to help local government leads and partners operate within current finance and policy systems to better prepare themselves and their communities for climate resilience funding and finance.

The toolkit walks users through ten characteristics to integrate into climate resilience projects to ensure they’re ready to receive the funding and finance needed for success by benefiting from collaborative partnerships, using intentional processes, using comprehensive accounting practices, and benefiting from enabling regulatory and policy frameworks. 

  • Characteristic 1 describes how to leverage supportive partnerships to increase potential funding and finance available for projects. 
  • Characteristic 2 describes how to get buy-in from community and government leaders in positions of power to increase resilience projects' level of priority in the local governments' portfolio and counter any resistance to climate resilience action. 
  • Characteristic 3 describes how to prioritize investment communities that are both highly exposed to climate risks and have fewer resources, capacity, safety nets, or political power to respond to those risks because of current or historic discrimination. 
  • Characteristic 4 describes how to co-develop with the people most impacted by resilience decisions and directly integrate residents' knowledge and experience into project design and implementation.
  • Characteristic 5 describes how to combine funding and finance from a variety of sources, referred to as 'blended finance' to cover all stages of resilience building from community co-development and project design to execution and longer-term monitoring and performance measurement. 
  • Characteristic 6 describes how to bundle projects regionally, by program, or by hazard to create economies of scale for project implementation and increase the likelihood of obtaining funding and finance. 
  • Characteristic 7 describes how to take an innovative approach to project accounting practices to make a stronger case and to communicate the benefits they bring to communities in the language that drives financial decision-making: dollar value. 
  • Characteristic 8 describes how to ground resilience processes and outcomes in climate resilience metrics to ensure accountability, develop buy-in, and build political will through success stories. 
  • Characteristic 9 describes how to ground efforts within existing community plans that articulate a long-term pipeline of projects.
  • Characteristic 10 describes how to benefit from policies that incentivize or mandate equitable climate resilience investment, such as standards and codes that enforce climate resilience criteria, mandatory risk assessments, or tax incentives for investments that prioritize LMI and BIPOC communities.

The toolkit also provides tips for overcoming challenges such as lack of resources, funding, or political will and a mismatch between older plans and community needs. Challenges addressed include

  • Traditional accounting practices and economic assessments aren’t working to get projects off the ground.
  • Lack of staff capacity to get started on climate resilience projects.
  • Lack of understanding as to why or how to implement climate resilience projects.
  • Need for support to center social equity in climate resilience projects.
  • Regulatory barriers.

The Ready-to-Fund Resilience Toolkit was created through a partnership between the American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP) and Climate Resilience Consulting (CRC). It was developed in support of the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit, and its “Steps to Resilience” planning framework. The work was supported by a grant from the Climate Resilience Fund (CRF) and made possible in part by a NOAA cooperative agreement with CRF. Learn more about the full Ready-to-Fund Resilience Project or the Funding and Finance Peer-Learning Group.

Publication Date: March 2022

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  • Best practice
  • Policy analysis/recommendations

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