pResilience

Where you live, do you feel prepared for unavoidable major changes in your environment and lifestyle? Do you feel fully informed as to how climate change will impact your region, your community and your lifestyle? Is your government providing good information and leadership to mitigate that impact?

If you answered Yes to any of those questions, email me right away. I want to know about where you live. If you answered No to all of them, then join the club. For at this time, no one can truly be prepared. No one can know what impacts will land where. And very few governments are doing much at all to lead the effort to prepare and to inform their citizens. But some are trying, experimenting and making honest efforts at the grassroots and local government levels. Yay!

The purpose of pResilience is to find the best examples available of grassroots efforts to prepare for climate change at the local level. In very few cases, local government is playing an admirable role. In more - but still few - cases, citizen groups are taking matters into their own hands, providing models that communities can follow in changing their assumptions and strategies for a time when things will be different, when our expectations of stability will be spoiled.

If you’re working with an effective group, devising a workable plan, you may have valuable experience to share. I’d like to hear from you. We are in the opening decades of changes for which none of us is prepared. There’s no manual as to how to deal with this at the local level, so we’ve got to begin gathering the knowledge to write our own.

pResilience has evolved from three predecessor concepts:

• Climate Frog is a blog that originally reported evidence of local communities taking any climate-spurred action at all on more than the verbal plane. As I studied the climate change situation, I realized that the odds are high that we’ll be contending with signifcant climate change impacts before mid-century. I altered my course to report on news and science that could inform local adaptation to new climates.
• AdaptLocal was an idea to provide a template-based Web “answer” to the question, “How do local governments collaborate with citizens on adaptive planning issues?” I had a vision of selling these sites affordably for county and municipal governments to provide best of breed resources to support local education and broad-based action to prepare for new climates. Unfortunately, county government governments haven’t proven ready to take on another responsibility or expense, even if it will help them greatly in the end. So, rather than spend all year selling into a reluctant market….
• I’ve recently created pResilience. “Resilience” presents a less grim prospect than “adaptation.” PREsilience means that we’ve got to prepare first in order to achieve a state of resilience when conditions require it.

Climate adaptation will be a bottom-up social process. Goverment at all levels has become compromised, overburdened, dysfunctional and disabled. To the extent that there are exceptions to that assessment, I’ll recognize them here. But I expect that most of the content of this blog will be about citizen groups pulling together to make the appropriate adjustments to the obvious and probable changes coming at us fast.