Key Strategies

• Avoiding displacement of existing neighborhoods, residents, and businesses through careful planning and built-in policy flexibility for vulnerable communities.

• Prioritizing neighborhood planning and engagement for equity and sustainability; let communities help drive their climate adaptation efforts.

• Building rural resiliency through investment in farmers, sustainable agriculture programs, and rural communities.

• Instituting community emergency response plans, especially for vulnerable populations.

• Working with public health officials and departments to identify and quantify the health costs of failing to mitigate climate change.

• Studying the health and quality-of-life impacts of pollution on different communities, with the knowledge that climate change is already having an outsized impact on low-income communities and communities of color: Black Americans are 75 percent more likely than white Americans to live in polluted communities.