To better understand EDA's role, we conducted semi-structured interviews with EDA staff, grantees, local collaborators, and staff at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
As the climate changes, communities need innovative policies and programs to build resilience and reduce the harmful impacts of extreme weather. Today’s leaders also have unparalleled opportunities to invest in communities so they can effectively embrace transitions from a fossil fuel–based economy to one fueled by renewable energy. It is critical that all can thrive amid new, climate-related interventions.
To support these evolving efforts, the Urban Institute provides impact-driven research, technical assistance, policy analysis, and strategic communications for changemakers seeking to build safer, more prosperous, and resilient communities for everyone. We work with policymakers, city planners, and community leaders to understand how past, current, and upcoming decisions shape a community’s climate risk and to identify strategies to equitably adapt to an uncertain future. Our experts seek to advance evidence and policy and programmatic solutions to ensure the following:
- All people and communities are safe from the warming climate, now and in the future.
- Climate investments are maximally effective, and their benefits are shared equitably, reach the people and communities most in need, and are delivered with urgency.
- Decarbonization goals are met without reducing economic opportunity and pathways to upward mobility, especially for those who have been historically and systematically excluded.
Urban’s climate change, disasters, and community resilience team relies on the breadth of knowledge across the institute to inform and strengthen our work, collaborating with colleagues whose expertise intersects with ours, including health policy researchers who study how climate change affects health outcomes for different groups of people and land-use and transportation experts who can chart the path toward emissions reductions at scale.
Our Impact
Urban has a track record of solutions-oriented research across diverse policy areas centered on climate change. Our climate change, disasters, and community resilience team includes leading experts who evaluate the effectiveness of resilience interventions, including that of the 100 Resilient Cities initiative, the largest investment in city capacity building for climate resilience to date. Through our evaluation of the US Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grants for Disaster Recovery program, we called attention to significant time lags between disaster response and housing recovery and provided solutions for improving the program’s speed and equity. Our experts also partner with frontline communities affected by climate change. They include communities in the Gulf Coast, where we assessed local capacity to receive climate migrants, and in Colorado, where our research informed a new tool to help local governments assess and reduce their hazard risk.