US EPA’s EnviroAtlas is an existing resource that provides a wealth of data and tools that can be used in a multitude of ecological decision-making contexts. Because the EnviroAtlas platform is free and has a low training threshold, it presents an accessible option for resilience planning in small- to medium-sized cities and municipalities who might otherwise have no cost-effective recourse to ecosystem services assessment, resilience planning, and adaptation. How can the EPA's EnviroAtlas be leveraged to identify and address community resilience needs across the USA, enabling communities to actively undertake cross-sector resilience planning and community development? We 1) mined information from community resilience literature, 2) vetted information from internal EPA and external community projects for resilience themes, and 3) validated this information against data gleaned from stakeholder engagement, targeting specific resilience needs and identifying common community topics and goals of resilience planning. We used this information and the EPA’s EnviroAtlas to develop a focused resilience tool for community resilience planning and assessment.
Results/Conclusions
We identified public health, natural and built infrastructure, socioeconomic health, and government and leadership infrastructure as being specific, measurable topics and goals of import for effective community resilience across both the literature and stakeholder engagement. We created an interactive resource that communities can use to learn about these common resilience themes and the indicators by which themes can be measured. Stakeholders can access available EnviroAtlas geospatial data to evaluate their communities against resilience themes, as well as consult the process and example of other related ongoing projects through use cases. This work is ongoing and preliminary deployment of the resilience tool has been met with enthusiasm by stakeholders. By creating a resource where data for self-assessment, use case examples, and a resilience framework are situated in one easy to navigate location, we have created a powerful and holistic resilience planning tool accessible to all community stakeholders, regardless of technical background or financial constraint. This abstract has been reviewed and approved by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Its contents do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Agency.