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Community Resilience Building
The need for municipalities, regional planning organizations, corporations, states, and federal agencies to increase resilience to extreme weather events and a changing climate is strikingly evident amongst the communities across the state of Rhode Island. Recent events such as Tropical Storm Irene, Super Storm Sandy, severe winter storms (2013 & 2015), and even the recent severe flooding during the summer of 2022 (i.e., I-95 closure) have reinforced this urgency and compelled leading communities like the Town of Lincoln to proactively collaborate on planning and mitigating risks. Ultimately, this type of leadership is to be commended because it will reduce vulnerabilities and reinforce the strengths of people, infrastructure, and ecosystems and serve as a model for other communities in Rhode Island, New England, and the nation.
In the summer of 2022, the Town of Lincoln embarked on certification within the state of Rhode Island’s Municipal Resilience Program (MRP). As part of that certification, the Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank (RIIB) and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) provided the Town with a community-driven process called Community Resilience Building to assess current hazards and climate change impacts and to surface projects, plans, and policies for improved resilience. In December 2022, Lincoln’s Core Team helped organize a Community Resilience Building Workshop facilitated by TNC in partnership with RIIB. The core directive of this effort was the engagement with and between community members to define strengths and vulnerabilities and the development of priority resilience actions for the Town of Lincoln.
The Lincoln Community Resilience Building Workshop’s central objectives were to:
- Define top local, natural, and climate-related hazards of concern.
- Identify existing and future strengths and vulnerabilities.
- Identify and prioritize actions for the Town.
- Identify opportunities to collaboratively advance actions to increase resilience alongside residents and organizations from across the Town and beyond. Lincoln Community Resilience Building Process Summary of Findings December 2022
The Town of Lincoln employed an “anywhere at any scale”, community-driven process called Community Resilience Building (CRB) (www.CommunityResilienceBuilding.org). The CRB’s tools, reports, other relevant planning documents, and local maps were integrated into the workshop process to provide both decision-support and visualization around shared issues and existing priorities across Lincoln. The Lincoln Local Hazard Mitigation Plan (2016, updated 2022) was particularly instructive as a reference. Using the CRB process - rich with information, experience, and dialogue - the participants produced the findings presented in this summary report. This includes an overview of the top hazards, current concerns and challenges, existing strengths, and proposed actions to improve Lincoln’s resilience to hazards and climate change today, and in the future. The summary of findings transcribed in this report, like any that concern the evolving nature of risk assessment and associated action, is proffered for comments, corrections and updates from workshop attendees and other stakeholders. The leadership displayed by the Town of Lincoln on community resilience building will benefit from the continuous participation of all those concerned.