Community Readiness and Resilience Toolkit

Step 2: Identify Concerns and Gather Information

 

 

 
 

Step 2: Identify Concerns and Gather Information

 
 

Step 1

Get Started

Step 2

Identify Concerns and Gather Information

Step 3

Assess Vulnerability & Understand Risks

Step 4

Develop Resilience Strategies

Step 5

Take Action

Step 6

Monitor, Adjust, and Maintain Your Plan

 

Step 2

In this step, you will identify the community’s concerns and gather the information that will help you to understand the challenges your community faces now and will likely face in the future.

Guiding Questions

  • How can you leverage community conversations already happening about past and future concerns?
  • Have any major shock events shaped the way the community is thinking about disasters, climate change, or community stressors?
  • Are there existing programs or plans in your community that are already addressing identified community concerns?
  • Are there existing stressors in your community that climate change could exacerbate?
  • Are there key climate-related thresholds that could significantly shape your community’s concerns if crossed?
  • What sectors will be most impacted by a shock event, stressor, or the changing climate?
  • Are you using the best available data and information?

Checklist for Step 2

  • Activity 1: Gather Information About Current Conditions and Historical Trends
  • Activity 2: Gather Information About Future Changes to Your Community
  • Activity 3: Identify Key Community Concerns
  • Activity 4: Establish Vision, Goals, and Guiding Principles

 

Step 2, Activity 1: Gather information about current conditions and historical trends

In this activity, you will gather information from a variety of sources about what shocks and stressors are already impacting your community’s economic, environmental, and social health and wellbeing.

Tips

  • Look beyond historic events. Historic events are not always a good indicator of what shocks and stressors may impact your community in the future. It is important to contextualize that information as you gather data. It is important to think of both new hazards and risks that may emerge as well as old hazards operating in new and more dangerous ways.
  • Align your resilience and recovery planning efforts. Consider how past recovery efforts from previous events have aligned with resilience planning efforts already happening in your community. What strengths were demonstrated? What barriers were encountered?

Why?

To plan for the future, you must first understand what shocks and stressors have historically impacted your community. At the same time, the foundation of any resilience planning effort depends on having accurate and up-to-date information on the range of environmental, social, and economic conditions your community already faces. Information, and our access to it, are always changing. Keeping pace with these changes through internal efforts or strategic partnerships can help you protect and nurture your community, especially as risk patterns change.

When?

This process can take anywhere from several weeks to several months. You can select the level of detail and the amount of information and data gathering that is appropriate for the scope of your project or assessment.

How does my community do this?

  1. Locate relevant data sources. Start by looking at the Resources and Guides template in the workbook. This template will be utilized in Activity 1 and 2.  There are many resources available for gathering information about hazards, especially as it relates to weather, climate, past disaster events, and critical developments to communities in Colorado. Similarly, there are a growing number of tools available for extracting information about the people, places, things, and systems that communities care about and rely upon.  There are a variety of important data sources available to you at the State and Federal level (see the Resilience Analysis and Planning Tool (RAPT)).  

  2. Next, define the basic characteristics of your community. Key questions include what is the geographic location and size of your community and important demographic criteria. This information can be used for a variety of planning processes such as fulfilling the need to understand risk and understand needs and capacities in a pre-disaster recovery plan. Additionally, you might examine how critical transportation hubs, networks, and infrastructure define the region’s access to resources, as outlined in this Recovery Planning Template. Note that the 2020 Colorado Resiliency Framework is intended to provide you with tools to easily gather the information needed, and to develop a concise, but thorough, narrative that presents baseline information needed to support the development of your resiliency strategy.

  3. Define your community’s characteristics and key indicators by sector. The Shocks and Stressors template in the workbook can get you started. Shocks and stressors impact the variety of sectors in your community in unique and specific ways. Defining the unique attributes of your community by sector will help you identify the historic, current, and future projected impacts to your community and develop resilience strategies to address those impacts. Using the six sectors that are defined in the Colorado Resiliency Framework (page 9) may help you define your community characteristics, though you should not feel required to do the same. These sectors include Community; Economic; Health and Social; Housing; Infrastructure; and Watersheds and Natural Resources. You are encouraged to consider what best fits your community. Key questions include: 

    • What does resilience mean for the sector? 

    • What does this look like in action? What are the shocks and stresses most often associated with this sector? 

    • What potential strategies could enhance resiliency in this sector?

  4. Identify current and potential future shocks and stressors.  The Colorado Resiliency Office has many resources to help you with this task (see the Colorado Resiliency Framework, StoryMap, and dashboard). In addition, historic events and an estimate of the impact can be found at the US Census Bureau OnTheMap tool or Future Avoided Cost Explorer Tool. Defining those shocks and stressors are key to understanding how they may be changing and how you can develop resilience strategies to address them. It may also be useful to outline shocks and stressors as they may impact critical sectors and frontline community members, which your advisors and stakeholders can help inform. Key questions include:

    • Which long-term stressors will impact your community’s ability to plan for, respond to, and recover from hazard events?

    • Which environmental, climate, weather, or man-made hazards have the potential to impact your community in ways that hinder its well-being?

Resources Call Out

 Use credible data sources. There are all sorts of data already available to help support your exploration of future changes and risks to the community. Start with the following resources to define risk in your community.

 

Step 2, Activity 2: Gather information about future changes to your community

In this activity, you will use reputable and credible local, regional, state, or national models, tools, and information sources to identify projected changes to your community including historic and current census data, projections for future changes to the climate, and potential stressors.

Tips

Reach out to the CRO! We are happy to help you navigate the wide array of environmental, social, and economic data through our Resource Center and/or an email.

Why?

Climate change, development, changing demographics, changing technology, shifting economies, and globalization impact all of our communities in important ways. To deal with both ongoing and future processes of change, communities must be aware of broader processes at play that may come to shape their daily life and well-being. This is part of understanding community risk (not just current risk, but also future risk) and can support pre-disaster recovery planning (navigate to Step 4 Activity 4 for more information) and other planning processes. Understanding risk also presents an opportunity to understand and develop strategies to address that risk.

When?

As part of the initial data-gathering efforts. This process should generally take several weeks.

How does my community do this?

  1. Identify key social, demographic, and other important community trends. Determining how your community is changing - whether it is growing, shrinking, aging, or becoming more diverse - plays a central role in its ability to deal with changing environmental, economic, and social conditions. Be sure to visit the Community Resilience Organizations’ Community Resilience Assessments and Actions Guide to support this activity. In addition, resources with the State Demographer’s office, as well as work by the Colorado Water Conservation Board can be helpful, as both work to project current trends relating to population growth and resource demands at the local, county, regional, and state levels. 

  2. Integrate the best available information on environmental change, including climate change. Examples include the Colorado Climate Plan, Western Water Assessment, and other research. Reach out to local universities, the CRO, the Western Water Assessment (one of NOAA’s Regionally Integrated Sciences and Assessment Centers), or other partners for help gathering and summarizing this information if needed. 

  3. Identify potential economic or technological changes and their impacts. Look to work with researchers, entrepreneurs, or others within the state’s university community to understand how different economic factors (for example, water markets) and technologies (such as agrovoltaics) may affect or play a role in your community’s future.

Community Call Out: Northwest Colorado Council of Governments 

In 2018, the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments - a coalition of county and municipal governments located in Jackson, Grand, Eagle, Summit, and Pitkin Counties - commissioned the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization to conduct a study of the region’s future risks and exposures under several climate change scenarios, titled Climate Change in the Headwaters. Because these counties all rely heavily upon winter snowpack and watershed function for their economies and local ecosystems, it focused on water and snow impacts. Using a wide array of established state and national climate projection information, including climate change projections from the Western Water Assessment and the University of Colorado, they were able to identify: a) What has happened; b) What could happen; and, c) What is at stake across several key dimensions of the regions, such as annual snowpack, water shortages, and the Colorado River Compact, winter recreational impacts, shifts in annual tourism patterns, and impacts to water quality. By utilizing previous workshops and interview reports from towns and cities in their region, they were able to further ground the high-level climate information they gathered in examples from local livelihoods and experiences.

 

Step 2, Activity 3: Identify Key Community Concerns

In this activity, you will identify the community's concerns about current and future shocks and stressors.

Tips

  • Consider developing a draft vision, goals, and guiding principles during this activity. If you choose to host a workshop specific to identifying key concerns, start with an exercise to develop a draft vision, goals, and guiding principle statements.
  • Prepare to be surprised. Engaging with community members often yields insights that may be surprising or that may fly in the face of what you may think you already know. Preparing to work with a mindset in which both top-down scientific knowledge can be integrated with local expertise is critical to future resilience planning efforts.
  • Nurture key stakeholder relationships along the way. The process of identifying key concerns can provide the foundation for new and continued engagement with key stakeholders, local leaders, and experts on critical sectors. As you reach out during this process, continue to find ways to make sure that these valuable community assets can be brought on board for future efforts in the resilience planning process.

Why?

At this point, you likely have identified a wide range of information about historic and current shocks and stressors, future risks, and the characteristics that could potentially enhance these risks. Sharpening the focus of your analysis from global-, national-, and state-level resources to the local level through community insight will provide the best foundation for action and implementation going forward. Also consider completing Activity 4 at the same time during this stage in the planning process.

When?

After the core project team has undertaken initial data and information gathering efforts and key stakeholders/experts have been identified. Workshop planning can take several weeks, but requires substantial lead time and communication to ensure that your core team and advisory committee are prepared, and to ensure that you effectively garner community attention and input.

How does my community do this?

  1. Solicit community input on key concerns.  Refer back to the community engagement plan you developed in Step 1, Activity 4 to determine how you would like to solicit community input. There are a variety of tools, methods, and approaches to doing so including:

    • Surveys, targeted at specific sectors, an array of sectors, the community in general, specific industries, or other types of groups (e.g. healthcare professionals, elder care facility operators, advocates, and organizations dealing with poverty and homelessness, etc.) can be conducted online, via mail, or in person at community gatherings. See a sample Community Survey template. 

    • Interviews with key sector leaders, experts, community organization representatives, or other key stakeholders can expand upon survey results, uncover new insights and observations not accessible through other methods, and allow for deeper dialogue on specific issues, risks, and the local dynamics of how stressors and shocks interact.

    • Focus Groups bringing together small groups of community members, sector leaders, experts, or organization representatives can also provide valuable insights on how your community discusses and understands different issues. These can also provide a valuable site for understanding how findings from surveys and interviews play out in a group setting and are interpreted across different points of view.

    • Workshops, like focus groups, bring together an array of stakeholders to solicit input on critical issues, albeit with the added framing of developing specific products or findings. These can be utilized as sites for synthesizing information gathered through other methods, to develop draft lists of key community concerns, or to identify future work plans based on findings gathered so far.  Access a sample visioning and goals workshop exercise. 

    • Track your effort through the Community Engagement Plan template in the workbook.  

  2. Draft key community concerns and solicit feedback from your core planning team and advisory committee. Identifying and quantifying key concerns is an iterative process. This means that after an initial round of work has been completed to solicit information from community members and experts on their key concerns, a draft list or outline of these concerns should be developed and presented to those same community members, experts, or sector leaders for further feedback to highlight gaps that may not otherwise come to light. 

  3. Finalize the key community concerns list. Once you have additional feedback from your community partners, you can begin to finalize the list of key concerns. Although this list will likely evolve, it should be used as a foundation for both discussions on the project as a whole and as a focusing tool for soliciting new engagement, planning efforts, and continued research.

Community Call Out: State of the Rockies Conservation

Now in its 11th year, the State of the Rockies Conservation in the West Poll is a polling program run by Colorado College. Through phone call interviews with thousands of residents across the Rocky Mountain West, it seeks to find information on how locals are thinking of critical natural resources, climate, and conservation issues. Published annually, its poll results provide a unique picture of how Coloradans and others in nearby states are engaging with these and other issues of central importance to resilience and adaptation efforts.

 

Step 2, Activity 4: Establish Vision, Goals and Guiding Principals

In this activity, the core planning team, advisory committee, and the community will work together to define the vision, goals, and objectives.

Tips

  • Think Creatively - Look to work with artists and other creative community members during the community workshopping and vision development process to open up conversations and provide valuable touchstones for discussing otherwise abstract dimensions of community goals.
  • Integrate Existing Visions and Plans - Significant work is often done as part of the county and municipal planning efforts. Likewise, community advocacy groups may have already developed community values, goals, and visions specific to their sector that could inform your work. Utilize, integrate, and build upon these where possible. If existing master plans or city planning efforts have recently been undertaken, these can provide a foundation for efforts here. However, as the visions and goals you establish here will provide the moral and ethical underpinning of the work that follows, it should draw from the widest possible array of stakeholders and community members at the earliest possible time after the initial information gathering effort has taken place.

Why?

Your vision, goals, and guiding principles will serve as a cornerstone for your resilience planning and will help communicate your plan to harness community engagement and implementation efforts. This activity is essential in developing ideas and bringing them to fruition.

When?

This process can take days to weeks depending on the amount of community engagement you choose to do to refine these. This process may happen as a part of the workshops, focus groups, interviews, or focus groups from Activity 3.

How does my community do this?

  1. Call the CRO. As a part of our broader support in helping communities develop a Resilience Framework, the Colorado Resiliency Office can assist in developing your community vision, goals, and guiding principles. 

  2. Define your community resilience vision, goals, and guiding principles. Visions, goals, and guiding principles should be rooted in your community’s values. This CRO Resilience Vision, Goals, and Guiding Principles Guide template can help. 

  3. Refine your vision, goals, and guiding principles. Once you have worked with your community to develop draft visions, goals, and guiding principles, formalize these with your core planning team, the advisory committee, and, if possible, municipal, county, or other appropriate offices. The Colorado Resilience Framework, which can be used as a model as you refine your vision, goals, and guiding principles, orients itself around six priorities for advancing resilience across the State, developed from over 500 survey responses, multiple statewide summits with experts and public organizations. 

Community Call Out: Salida, CO

Through the process of developing the Salida 2013 Comprehensive Plan, public meetings were held to develop the city’s vision statement. The vision statement was then refined by the core planning team, the planning commission, and the city council. As stated in the 2013 plan, “the vision statement is a broad but concise description of what [the City] wants the community to be in the future.”

The Vision: “Salida recognizes the importance of conserving and enhancing its historic small-town character and embraces a future that preserves the natural environment and offers its residents and visitors a multi-generational community with an eclectic range of housing, jobs, education, business, shopping and recreation opportunities”

 

Additional Guidance for Step 2

Click on the question to expand the answer.

+ What do we do if we don’t have local data management or GIS capabilities?

If your agency or community does not have access to programs like ArcGIS or other spatial analysis software, you are not out of luck. While spatially explicit planning is useful it isn’t always necessary depending on the scale and scope of the plan you are working to complete. If you do pursue that more spatially explicit approach, several resources can help supplement these needs.

  • Contact the State: As recommended in the DOLA Planning for Hazards guide, it might be useful to reach out to the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, whose work is heavily involved in mapping and data sources relevant to this work.
  • Use the tools referenced above to generate maps. Many of the tools allow you to customize visualizations and export maps for free.
  • Contact the Department of Geography at your nearest university or college: In general, students in the geospatial sciences are always looking for research projects and meaningful community service. In addition, organizations like the Colorado State University Geospatial Centroid are well suited to assist learners with the GIS data acquisition, management, and visualization process.
  • Explore the CRO website to discover current and future weather and climate risks and other challenges.

+ How do I establish a collaborative relationship with a university or research entity to help with this work?

Start by asking. Check with your Core team as they may already have existing relationships with a local or regional university. Any department that is relevant to your planning approach may be eager to have “real world” opportunities to collect or share data, conduct analysis, or participate in a planning process. Also, check with the Western Water Assessment (one of NOAA’s Regionally Integrated Sciences and Assessment Centers) at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

+ How do I find out if other organizations are doing work relevant to this effort?

Reach out to the CRO or look through the case studies on this website. Also, use the peer exchange to see what other communities are doing similar planning efforts. The CRO also annually updates this list of climate and resilience-related plans in Colorado.

+ How do I determine which climate change modeling data to use?

Climate science is always changing so check with the CRO, the Western Water Assessment, or neighboring communities to see what scenarios they are using for their planning efforts.

+ Everything I find about climate change is at the state level, but I know my local community’s weather and climate are somewhat unique. Are there resources that can give a more meaningful picture of what my community may face?

Colorado’s large size, unique topography, and resulting diversity in local weather and climate mean that state-wide assessments mostly account for broad impactful processes and events. There are two main ways to deal with this issue:

  1. Learn from and build institutional knowledge from past events. Using local experiences of extreme weather events, droughts, flash floods, and other localized occurrences build a set of scenarios to help to frame what increased intensity from these types of phenomena might bring to your community. In some cases, this may mean looking at work undertaken by neighbors who deal with similar local-scale weather formation and climate factors.
  2. Use downscaled climate change projection data. Statistical downscaling of climate data and projection model outputs is another approach that has been increasingly utilized in planning to prepare for future events. Luckily, numerous resources are available in Colorado to assist planners with this process through Colorado’s university networks. Contacts at the Colorado Climate Center can help to point you towards which resource might be the best for your situation. Additional Colorado organizations with known downscaling climate data and local scenario development experience include:

    Western Water Assessment
    National Center for Atmospheric Research / University Corporation for Atmospheric Research at CU Boulder
    Colorado Natural Heritage Program
    Center for Collaborative Conservation
    Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory
    North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center

For those interested in GIS Data of downscaled climate projection data, AdaptWest and the Conservation Biology Institute provide resources.