Dr. Jason Vogel, interim director of the Climate Impacts Group, is co-author on a recently published article in Sustainability on the influence of federal policy on local climate adaptation efforts. 

The article, Climate Adaptation at the Local Scale: Using Federal Climate Adaptation Policy Regimes to Enhance Climate Services, was published earlier this month in a special edition of Sustainability focused on climate services. 

Vogel and his co-author, Charles Herrick, reviewed 17 case studies of local climate adaptation efforts for the role of federal law, policy and programs, the organizations and agencies involved, and the use of science. 

They found in many cases, federal laws and policies provide a framework for local policy as well as “technical and fiscal resources beyond what any individual locality could muster on its own.” An overlooked element of the climate adaptation landscape, they write, is the role of federal policy as a “bottom-up” approach to local climate action, as local governments take advantage of policy tools to achieve their own resilience objectives. 

They suggest that climate services providers can take one or both of two approaches to integrate this knowledge into their work. One is to work directly with communities to navigate federal laws, policy and governance. Another is to engage with federal agencies to learn how policies are being implemented to achieve climate resilience at the local scale. 

Ultimately, they propose that organizations working in climate adaptation “may need to move beyond existing models of co-production to embrace an ‘apprenticeship’ model.” The apprenticeship model, they write, would allow climate service providers to learn the ins and outs of policy and governance so they can “recognize factors that influence the applicability, usefulness, and uptake of climate products and services.”