ICARP Climate Services
ICARP technical assistance, decision-support tools, guidance, and other adaptation and resilience resources.
The Integrated Climate Adaptation and Resiliency Program supports California communities and climate adaptation practitioners by providing Climate Services such as actionable guidance, decision support tools, and technical assistance.
The ICARP Climate Services team helps organizations in California understand and use climate change information to advance climate adaptation action across the state. Climate Services are useful to organizations such as local, regional, and State public agencies; community-based organizations; and tribes. The team develops climate adaptation guidance and tools, helps people use climate change science and data, supports local adaptation planning and projects, and assists California public agencies and other organizations in making climate-resilient decisions and investments. The Climate Services team collaborates with other State agencies to align State climate information and resources and helps local and regional groups collaborate on and align their efforts for climate resilience. Staff can also provide limited one-on-one assistance upon request and can support you in navigating State adaptation regulations and guidance. ICARP’s Climate Services resources include the following.
The Adaptation Clearinghouse is a centralized library of information and over 1000 California-specific resources for adapting to climate change. Public Resources Code 71360 (Senate Bill 246, 2015) established the Clearinghouse to support holistic, science-based climate resilience decisions, planning, and projects across local communities, regions, and the State. Clearinghouse resources include toolkits and templates, example plans and projects, curated case studies, scientific studies, tools and data, guidance documents, and more. You can filter resources by climate impact, geographic location, topics of interest, and more.
Cal-Adapt is the State’s climate change data download and visualization platform. Anyone can access Cal-Adapt to explore local climate change impacts on the Local Climate Change Snapshot Tool, download climate projection data with the data download features, and explore other data visualization tools. Cal-Adapt is useful for learning about and documenting how climate change will impact your local climate in the future in different scenarios – This is particularly useful for those who are assessing their risk and vulnerability.
ICARP Climate Services is working with the California Energy Commission to update and expand Cal-Adapt with the latest climate science and data. To learn more, you can read a blog post about upcoming changes to Cal-Adapt and you can contact Ben McMahan at ben.mcmahan@opr.ca.gov.
The Vulnerable Communities Platform will help people identify the populations most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change in California. It will aggregate climate projection and sensitivity maps as well as guidance, tools, and other resources to support equitable climate adaptation.
Although there is plenty of evidence that climate change disproportionately impacts some communities more than others, the State does not have a tool that holistically displays the data needed to understand which communities are most vulnerable to climate change. ICARP staff are designing the Vulnerable Communities Platform to address this gap and to assist community practitioners, government staff, and others in more effectively allocating adaptation resources to the communities most vulnerable to climate change.
“Planning and Investing for a Resilient California: A Guidebook for State Agencies.” provides high level guidance on what future climate conditions to plan for and how State agencies should approach planning in light of a changing climate. Executive Order B-30-15 directed State agencies to integrate climate change into all planning and investment decisions, including accounting for current and future climate conditions when making infrastructure investments. To develop guidance to support implementation of the Executive Order, OPR convened a Technical Advisory Group, which included members from State agencies, local and regional governments, non-governmental and community-based organizations, and the private sector. The Technical Advisory Group met from April 2016 through January 2017 and produced the Planning and Investing for a Resilient California guidebook.