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October 21, 2025
Capacity building is crucial to the success of community-led climate adaptation and resilience projects. In our latest podcast episode, we sit down with Liz Tully of the Climate Resilience Fund to learn about the Climate Smart Communities Initiative (CSCI). We also chat with community leaders from Kentucky to Idaho about how CSCI grants have made local resilience efforts possible, and how federal and state support could make their work even more impactful.
Show notes:
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About this Podcast:
With all the depressing climate news out there, it’s sometimes hard to see progress. The Climate Conversation cuts through the noise and presents you with relevant climate change solutions happening on the Hill and in communities around the United States.
Twice a month, join Environmental and Energy Study Institute staff members as they interview environmental, energy, and policy experts on practical, on-the-ground work that communities, companies, and governments are doing to address climate change.
Whether you want to learn more about the solutions to climate change, are an expert in environmental issues, or are a policy professional, this podcast is for you.
Episode Transcript:
Dan Bresette: Hello and welcome to The Climate Conversation podcast. I'm Dan Bresette, president of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, and I'm joined today by my co-host for this episode, Hannah Wilson-Black, who is on our communications team here at EESI. Hannah, thanks for joining me for this episode.
Hannah Wilson-Black: Hi, Dan. Thanks so much. Today, we're going to be highlighting the work of the Climate Resilience Fund, which runs a program with five partner organizations that provides capacity-building and grants to communities called the Climate Smart Communities Initiative. The Fund is an organization that works with public and private partners across the United States in order to advance the inclusive and adaptive approaches that are needed to build climate resilience for people, communities and natural systems. The Climate Smart Communities Initiative, which we'll sometimes refer to as CSCI, is one of three major programs run by the Fund. It provides grants to nature-based climate resilience projects throughout the country. Today, we're going to learn about two of them, in Floyd County, Kentucky and Blaine County, Idaho, where teams are working on the ground to improve extreme weather management and adaptation.
Dan Bresette: Thanks, Hannah. This is a little bit of a different format for our episode, because Hannah is with me here at the introduction, and she'll be back for the conclusion of the episode. And in the middle, I'm joined by our colleague, Susan Williams. Susan joined me for the interviews with our five guests, five guests for this podcast episode. So Hannah, see you back here at the end of the episode. I'm looking forward to learning all about the Climate Smart Communities Initiative. [Music plays]
Dan Bresette: So here we are with the first of our three interviews for this episode. And as I mentioned, my colleague Susan Williams is joining me. Susan, thanks for joining me on the podcast this week.
Susan Williams: Hi Dan and everyone. I'm Susan, the vice president of partnerships at EESI. I'm really excited for this episode because adaptation and resilience philanthropy is so important, yet too small for the needs of the many communities that are doing their best to deal with impacts from a changing climate.
Dan Bresette: Yes, could not agree more. And that brings us to our first guest, Liz Tully. Liz is program officer at the Climate Resilience Fund. Liz has more than 15 years of experience monitoring and supporting community-led conservation projects around the world and throughout the United States. Liz, it's great to see you. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of the climate conversation.
Liz Tully: Thanks for having me. I've been a big fan of EESI for a long time.
Dan Bresette: What is the Climate Smart Communities Initiative, and how did it get started?
Liz Tully: The Climate Smart Communities Initiative, most importantly, is a collaborative of five other organizations with the Climate Resilience Fund, where I work. It also includes the GEOS Institute, ICF, EcoAdapt, Fernleaf, the Environment, Equity, and Justice Center at the NRDC. It started, you know, in a way you would expect, the increasing frequency and severity of climate-related extremes is overtaking way too many communities. And while, as a country, we actually have quite a good understanding of these impacts, what's driving them, even solutions and tools for addressing them, excellent best standards and best practices for planning for them, the distribution of that knowledge and the access to those resources is very unequal across the nation. This initiative, the CSCI, was created to address the accessibility by pulling together the types of resources, expertise, tools that communities [need] across the country, particularly those that are not already investing in preparing for climate change and helping their communities be resilient and adapt, who maybe don't even know where to start, or who do know where to start but do not have the resources to do so. Part of what we are trying to do is make this approach we have established something, of course, that can be replicable, can apply to multiple communities across the country. So we have some national standards at play that we're adhering to, but we are designed to be flexible, as in, these projects are very much led by communities. The goals and visions and values are established and driven and owned by the communities, and the standards or practices for how those goals get executed is where some of the more technical expertise comes in to pair up with those community-driven values, community- defined needs. The other piece of CSCI that drove us to start or create this collaborative was also to set up something, a national program, that's intentionally designed to evaluate and assess what's working and not working in a rigorous way, so we know why. It's been this long time goal to try to understand when adaptation is working and successful and when it's not. Because of the time scale required and because of how frequently the progress gets disrupted by climate change, it is difficult, but we are actually trying to take on a system of monitoring through the usage of the tools and resources we're creating, and through the experience of these funded projects on the ground, a really robust M and E, monitoring and evaluation, system to start to define metrics for success, start to figure out and share as quickly as possible what we're learning is working and is not working.
Susan Williams: It sounds like you're able to support communities no matter what step in the process they're at. What is a good example of something this initiative has made possible for these communities that simply wasn't possible before?
Liz Tully: The funding is considered particularly flexible because it can be used for doing a vulnerability analysis or something technical, but it can also be used for convening and gathering and paying for meeting space and stipends for community participation, whatever your community needs at the stage it's currently at to make some progress forward. A project that I wanted to tell you all about is one that was led by the climate creation network with the Grand Caillou Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians in Louisiana. They are working on a project to create, for the first time ever, a climate resilience plan for the tribe, and that's unique for them, because they are motivated, driven community leaders, they've been working on addressing climate change and climate adaptation resilience within their tribe for a long time now, but they have been added on, in a piecemeal fashion, onto other funded efforts, other planning efforts, and this grant, for the first time, actually gave them ownership and leadership over their own plan. The biggest challenges they're facing are rapid coastal erosion, saltwater intrusion, and habitat destruction, which threaten their infrastructure and in this case, their cultural practices, which is another form of climate resilience that we support. Their livelihoods are being disrupted. There's damage to fish and wildlife habitat, which is undermining their traditional food sources and employment opportunities. They've also been working for 28 years to get federal recognition as a tribe, and that's been limiting the resources they have. As I kind of described earlier, they've had to kind of connect with and be added on to the efforts and resources of others. What they are hoping to do is increase the capacity of their own internal tribal leadership within the community, to build their own climate resilience. They're working, of course, at reducing and preparing for the impact of disasters to help safeguard their community and livelihoods, and lastly, their other goal is to ensure a more efficient and coordinated effort in response to pending or future disaster. to be more prepared.
Susan Williams: Thank you so much. That really illustrates why that community ownership is so important, and why the pairing with the technical experts, with the lead of the communities, really works so well.
Liz Tully: And I'll add that that the technical piece worked so well, but the adaptation practitioner in most cases, and in this case, also takes on the grant administration burden and the administration legwork of this as well, and the community gave us a quote directly saying something to the effect that that was just a huge burden relieved and lifted for them, that they could be drivers and create vision and be participating and investing, but they didn't have to worry about when a report was due for the grant, for example.
Susan Williams: What are these grantees depending on from the federal government to make their work under these grants possible?
Liz Tully: What these communities need from the government is simpler access to existing resources, existing tools, existing expertise. And that's a huge motivator for the CSCI is the fact that so much already exists that's useful and effective, and the difficult challenge is seaming those resources and tools together to target at certain communities based on what kinds of climate change hazards are impacting them. Are they on the coast? Are they dealing with coastal erosion or dealing with flooding? Are they facing wildfires? And at what stage they're at in their overall climate resilience journey? Again, do they not know where to start yet, or do they know what their problems are, but don't know what to do about them? Or they have, maybe they've worked on a plan, or a plan was funded by somebody else, you know, two or three years ago, and it's a good plan, now they want to implement pieces of it. So, pulling together those resources in a targeted way, so that no matter where you're at in your journey and what hazards are impacting you, you can find what you need. And so we do that through this grant-making, which pairs these technical experts up with communities at any starting place, but we also provide other types of tools, like the registry of adaptation practitioners. I think that's something that is needed from the government, and the government helped fund this registry, where you can look up by any town or city you're located in, filter by any climate hazard impacting you, any sector that is most important to you, there's a range of filters, and then you find adaptation practitioners that have been already vetted by a third party, by a scoring criteria based system, that are vetted to have the experience and expertise backing up the services they provide for you. We also have the adaptation help desk, which is part of the CSCI and that's a place where you go in and ask questions based, again, on the stage that you're at or the hazards that you're looking at, you can ask any questions, and that builds out this kind of interactive FAQ system. And if your question isn't there, you just put your question in the question box, and eventually that will start to populate the pre existing FAQ system. And the last thing we have that the CSCI has created to support more than just funded communities--the grant making component is a piece, there's a total of six pillars that we're all, that we're working on reach, to reach broader communities and broader workforce, not just the funded communities that we do per year--is the adaptation options database. It's a database of all the the known actions, solutions, tactics for adapting to climate change, again, based on geography, starting point, and climate change hazard. So those are the parts of the beginning of us, CSCI, trying to attempt to seam together and make the access more simple. But that is what I think is needed from communities by the government, is simpler access to these tools, being able to understand even what you need, and then when you know what you need, being able to find it easily.
Dan Bresette: Liz, thank you again for joining us on this episode. Later on in the episode, we're going to be talking to Blaine County, Idaho and Floyd County, Kentucky--I think actually, in the opposite order, I think Kentucky comes first, and then Idaho will come later--and we're going to learn about how this looks like from the perspective of people on the ground. I think you might have a little bit of news to share with people who might be interested in round three.
Liz Tully: I do. Thanks, Dan. We are thrilled to be able to announce a third round of grants this year, that announcement is coming very soon, possibly soon after this episode airs [see the links in our show notes]. So please make sure you follow the Climate Smart Communities Initiative on LinkedIn, or check our website for that announcement of when that next grant application is open. We want to do a special call out for the types of applicants that are interested who are a community-based organization or a local government and don't have someone they already know that they've worked with who qualifies as an adaptation practitioner or a technical consultant. We have a registry of those vetted adaptation practitioners that you need to have partnered with you to apply. And so we have a long application window-- it'll be, likely the end of March will be the deadline--to allow time, because it does [tame time]. It's easy to find people in the registry, but it takes time to reach out to them, talk to them about what you're working on, see if you're actually a fit and they're fit for you, and decide together to co-apply.
Dan Bresette: We will be sure to include information about round three in the show notes and in our postings on social media. Thanks and good luck.
Liz Tully: Thanks, Dan.
Susan Williams: Thanks. Liz.
Dan Bresette: All right, so now we're going to put faces, or at least voices, to what Liz just laid out for us, and we're going to do that by bringing on two of the 2025 grantee teams from the Climate Smart Communities Initiative. First up, we have Emily and Missy. And Emily and Missy represent Floyd County, Kentucky. That's where project partners are working on flood mitigation and adaptation planning. We wanted to talk to them first, because their project is in the research and assessment stage, which is one way the grant funds can be used. Emily and Missy, thank you so much for joining us today on the climate conversation podcast.
Emily Carlson: Glad to be here, thanks, Dan.
Missy Allen: Thank you for highlighting this for Floyd County.
Dan Bresette: So for my first question, I would like to start by asking each of you, Emily and Missy, if you could describe Floyd County and tell us what organizations you represent and what aspects of the Floyd County project you're specifically working on.
Missy Allen: So Floyd County, Kentucky is located in eastern Kentucky, we always like to say at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. We are a large county of about 396 square miles. We have a population of about 35,000, so we're a very mountainous, rural area. So we have hills and valleys, so as a result, we do experience a lot of flooding, and we have seen that exacerbated over the past several years. I represent, actually two entities in a way. I work for our County Judge-Executive here in Floyd County, Judge Robbie Williams, as his executive assistant and special projects director, and I'm also chairperson of the Floyd County Disaster Recovery Coalition, which we started after the '22 flood that was so devastating in our region.
Emily Carlson: So Missy is the local expertise on the ground. She knows everything about Floyd County. I am not in Floyd County. So I'm in West Virginia, I am the network coordinator for the Central Appalachian Network, that is called CAN. It's basically this huge network of networks of nonprofits that do economic development work throughout Central Appalachia, and we have all the different working groups. One of them focuses on community resilience and adaptation. And so that's all peer learning network of all different folks working throughout the region on issues like flooding and climate change and how to adapt, how to work together, to learn and come up with projects. And so, our group is basically a peer learning space. It's supporting the Floyd County project as a way so that whatever's learned in Floyd County, that we can help propagate that throughout Central Appalachia, but also provide a lot of support to the group while they do the project. It's three--so there's three RFPs. We're actually bringing on experts to do three assessments. So they've kind of started the groundwork, this is to get design concepts together that will create fundable projects. So one is a mitigation assessment, so that's using a lot of data that's already available, how to prevent future flooding. And then the second one is the housing plan, so how to really leverage and attract more investment, because there's all these buyout projects and credits. And then the third one is the hub, just the resilience hub plan itself, and that's more of an architectural design concept. And all of those require a lot of community input as well, so we just got all the proposals in, we're meeting today to go over the proposals from the contractors that'll hopefully work with our team.
Susan Williams: When did you all realize that the climate smart communities initiative might be a good fit for your work?
Missy Allen: As I said previously, we started our Floyd County Disaster Recovery Coalition in '22. We have had severe flooding in '21, in March of '21, July of '22 and then again this year, in February of '25 and so we're seeing an increase in the weather, and our people are experiencing just devastating flooding. What used to be very rare is now becoming sadly common. So as we looked at at this opportunity, it just seemed to be a good fit, because we have got to be able to find a way to develop a community resilience hub. Housing is critical for us. We already had a problem with housing. We have no housing inventory, and because of that flooding that we have experienced and people taking advantage of an offering that FEMA has where they will buy out that property and it then becomes green space, we had 125 sign up for that program in '22. We've had 350 sign up this year alone. So we already had a housing problem. Now we have a housing crisis. So we have got to get housing. So that's another thing, if we could lay some groundwork to be able to find, hopefully, grant opportunities and additional funding opportunities to solve some of these problems. My dream for our county is to have what I would call a community resilience hub. Now this flood happened in February. We've still got people living at the campground at Jenny Wiley State Park. We have had to shut down our state park for complete renovations. It's going to close through next year sometime. Well, that's no big deal. Well, it is a big deal because then it negatively affects us on the economic side, because our tourism, you know, we had, over the years, we've had 1000s and 1000s of people come to our community because Jenny Wiley State Park is a focal point for our county. Well, when it's shut down...and we do what we have to do. I mean, we want to take care of our flood survivors, but there's got to be a better way. So what do we do? We build a community resilience hub where we can house people short term, where we can have laundry, showers, where we can have a, you know, a community kitchen, or call it whatever you want, and have everything under one roof where we can distribute supplies, we can take in supplies, we can help our people in our county. That, to me, is a community resilience hub, and that way, we're not piecemealing across the county, "oh, we'll put them up at a campground, oh, we'll put them up at the lodge, oh, we'll put them up the community center," you know? And when we look at disasters and what can happen in our county, I always try to look at the three top [events], of course number one for us is flooding. Second is going to be probably ice storms. We do experience that sometimes. And then we also have issues with straight line winds, not so much tornadoes, but straight line winds, which can do just as much damage. So how we can continually meet the needs of people in our community by having such a facility for people to be able to go to in times of disaster?
Susan Williams: Can you tell us what stage your project is right now, and besides the Climate Smart Communities Initiative, are there other state or federal initiatives that complement this grant from CSCI that make your work possible?
Missy Allen: Overall, we are continuing to look for opportunities. We are trying to work with Kentucky Emergency Management to find opportunities. I had actually applied for a BRIC grant through FEMA. Of course, that funding was cut back earlier this year, and we did not get to access that funding. We are hopeful, though, that with this initiative, if we can get these assessments in place to let people see just basically, to me, through the numbers, if folks can see this how real this is, then we'll be able to put some dollars to that to be able to move forward. I will say that on the housing side, Governor Beshear has worked very closely with our County Judge-Executive, and we do have a Higher Ground project in eastern Kentucky. We do have a housing project going here in Floyd County, where we are working with different groups, and actually have four houses started. We've been able to purchase property through CDBG [Community Development Block Grant] monies and be able to help people that are flood survivors to be able to get into good quality housing. The property that we currently have, we're looking at probably 40 to 50 homes, but it's like everything else, it's a process. But we have been able to access funding for that, and it's a start. In all honesty, we've got probably a 1500 home shortfall. I mean, it's across all economic groups, from low income to the more higher income. So it's across the board, but at least we've got a starting place. So we're very thankful that we've been able to do that much. On the housing side, it's been a real focus, and we are starting to see some movement.
Emily Carlson: Like Missy has been saying, you know, these issues and the topography across Appalachia, all these communities are facing very similar challenges, much more acute in Eastern Kentucky, but we've also seen a lot in western North Carolina, obviously, as well. And so this group, when we identified the project, this working group--and there's so much expertise, you know, there's some academics as well, Natalie Kruse Daniels is on our planning team for this project, and she's a professor at Ohio University--our group and all the people that are looking at how to build resilience hubs, how to have disaster response plans, mitigation plans, long term recovery plans, all these resources that are so spread out, and all the resources are changing, and across our working group, we've realized that there's such a paucity of information that's relevant to Appalachia specifically. There's all these sort of kits and "how to do this," and it's all spread out. So we've been trying to, basically, we're creating a hub of information online so that everyone can know locally, like, what are the resources available? How can all these communities adapt to all these changing needs and have all the information in one place and make it actually relevant to these more rural communities?
Susan Williams: Are the organizations involved in this project and Floyd County residents at large or Central Appalachia networks discussing what they need from federal and state governments to help community adapt and thrive?
Emily Carlson: Missy has seen this firsthand, but communities in Appalachia are really great at jumping in and helping each other, so it's such a low hanging fruit for the federal government or anyone--foundations, whatever--to invest in communities and help them use their own internal resources and adaptations to adapt. So yeah, one of the first line of defenses that comes up again and again are just the disaster response teams themselves. There's so much infrastructure planning and then long term recovery needed, but the groups of local first responders, fire teams, you know, all the first responders in an area have these--sometimes they're VOAD, Voluntary Organizations for Disaster, and then CERT teams which were set up through FEMA--those teams, they need a lot of support and training and how to actually respond to events. That would be, I think, the first thing that needs, they need support and they need resources to be able to respond.
Dan Bresette: This has been great. Missy and Emily, thank you so much for joining. We really wish you the best of luck as you continue down this path. And I'm sure that our listeners will really appreciate sort of what you've all been through, and be really, really inspired by what you're doing about it, and putting the folks in Floyd County, putting them first like it sounds like you always do. So this has been a great conversation. Learned a lot, and good luck.
Missy Allen: Thank you.
Susan Williams: Thanks.
Dan Bresette: Quick interlude here for me, two acronyms were brought up, and we realized we didn't explain what they were. So you might remember Missy mentioning BRIC and BRECC. Those are different things. BRIC is the FEMA program, Building Resilient Infrastructure in Communities, and BRECC is B-R-E-C-C, and that's Building Resilient Economies in Coal Communities. So now we're going to hear about what the implementation stage of a climate resilience grant could look like. And to do that, we're going to talk to two folks out in Idaho, Eve Preucil and Lance Davisson. Eve and Lance represent a group of grantees from Blaine County, Idaho, a rural, mountainous community almost 2,000 miles to the west of Floyd County, Kentucky. Their project is tackling water scarcity issues, heat, and wildfire risk. Eve and Lance, welcome to the podcast. It's great to see you.
Lance Davisson: Thank you very much.
Eve Preucil: Great to be here.
Dan Bresette: And to start, I'd like to ask which specific aspects of the Blaine County project you're personally working on, and what other people and what other groups are you working with to get your work done?
Eve Preucil: For our Blaine County project, my main role as the Sustainability Coordinator for the county is facilitating our coalition, and we call it 5BCAN. It's the Blaine County Climate Action Network, and our grant application and project is really based off of that building block that the coalition has already set. So for me, a lot of my job is just facilitation and working with all of the nonprofits, all of the municipalities and the private businesses that are in our coalition and building up those partnerships.
Lance Davisson: Thank you, Eve. And my name is Lance Davisson, and I am the owner and Principal Consultant of the Keystone Concept, an urban natural resource planning firm located here in Idaho. And we've been working with Eve and the Blaine County team for well over six years now, really focused on the nature based solutions part of climate action. And so in this project, we were awarded $99,000 from CSCI to implement nature based solutions across the landscape. There's three key organizations involved in leading this effort here in Blaine County. It's Blaine County and the 5BCAN team, the Keystone Concept, and then Wood River Land Trust, who does a lot of riparian restoration and upland habitat work.
Susan Williams: Can you tell us what kind of impact that the funding and technical support from Climate Smart Communities Initiative has had on your ability to carry out this project?
Lance Davisson: That's a great question, Susan. Luckily, under Blaine County's leadership, we have a really robust plan for implementing action on the ground, and a lot of great invested stakeholders in that. When we found the CSCI opportunity, we were really, at the beginning of 2025, dealing with a ton of budget uncertainty, and so we looked at the opportunity, we said, "this is perfect." It really aligns with our work. And we all know that when you're building climate action and when you're working with stakeholders, it takes a long time to build the trust to for them to invest their time and effort into getting work done on the ground. So as that federal funding was going away or becoming more uncertain, we were pretty nervous, right? The Climate Smart Communities Initiative came in at a perfect time. So I think there's a few things that are wonderful about CSCI. One, it aligns so much with the work that we're already doing. But two, we also become part of a cohort with folks like Floyd County, Kentucky, and we can learn from them. We can share what we're learning. What do you want to add to that, Eve?
Eve Preucil: Thanks Lance, and thanks for the question, Susan. I'll add that Lance has been referencing a lot of the planning documents that we have at the county. So it might be helpful if I just describe those a little bit. So we have our Climate Action Plan that was adopted last summer in 2024 and that really serves as our guiding document for the county's work and for our 5BCAN coalition work all together. The Climate Action Plan has four different focus areas, I think around 13 goals and over 50 actions, as well as 25 different key performance indicators that we're tracking. One of those goals or/and focus areas is related to nature-based solutions and restoring our landscape and ensuring that our ecosystems function so that we can have a more resilient environment, both in the built environment and our natural environment. And so I'll say the Climate Action Plan, is 30% owned by the county, but we rely almost 70% on help from our partners to get the work done. With this huge plan, it's been incredible to be able to use funding from CSCI to actually execute. As Lance was saying, trust requires follow-through, and after making this plan, there is a lot of pressure to make sure that we can actually deliver on everything that the coalition asked to be in the plan. We're also working on a climate risk and vulnerability analysis, and that effort started around the same time as our application for CSCI, and the goal of the climate risk and vulnerability assessment is to help augment the adaptation and resilient metrics within the Climate Action Plan, and then it's also going to really serve as the basis of how we select different projects for the CSCI grant.
Susan Williams: You mentioned 2025 budget uncertainty and how this grant came at a perfect time to fill some holes. I was wondering, how quick was the turnaround from the time you found out about the grant opportunity to the time you were awarded the grant and able to start using the grant funds?
Lance Davisson: We were getting a lot of the news about shaky federal funding probably in January, February. I believe we found the Climate Smart Communities Initiative grant right around that time. So it was very fortuitous that it came at that time. And so we pulled together the grant application, it was due maybe a month later, and then we found out about the award, I think, in June, July, probably, and then we started really quickly. So the process is, I thought it was very smooth. It aligned a lot with our work that we were already doing. And the other thing that I just want to give props to the CSCI folks is that it is both public and private funding, which I think we need to be doing more of in this day and age. So I love the fact that it's a blend of funding. So much of this work relies off federal funding, and the more private philanthropy we can get involved, the better. So I just love how they teamed up to increase their impact together.
Susan Williams: That's great. I completely agree that we need more private philanthropy for resilience and adaptation for communities. Both of you mentioned the Valley. I'm not familiar with Blaine County, Idaho. Could you tell me what Valley you're speaking of and help set it geographically for people who are not familiar with it?
Eve Preucil: Absolutely. When we refer to the Valley, we're talking about Wood River Valley, but Blaine County is in south-central Idaho. It's kind of at the entrance to a mountain region, and so the south part of the county is very agricultural, and the northern part of the county is very mountainous, and we're home to Sun Valley Ski Resort. And so we have a lot of variation in our ecosystems and habitat, and a lot of tourism economy.
Susan Williams: That's really helpful for setting the stage. Thank you so much. When you were talking earlier, I could tell how many pieces to this project there are, with the action plan and the focal areas, the 13 goals, 25 key performance indicators. What is a day in the life of this project's implementation? What have you learned about the implementation of such an ambitious project? We would like to know if there's anything that you would suggest to pass along to anyone who's currently thinking about applying for a Climate Smart Communities grant.
Eve Preucil: I really try and help create regional cohesion for all of our climate work, so that we're all working together and building scale rather than working in our different little city silos. So for me, it's just a lot of connecting people and facilitation. Others are spending more time hands-on actually planting trees or restoring habitat. I'll also say I've been spending a lot of time doing those community workshops around climate vulnerability for the climate risk and vulnerability assessment, and it's been absolutely incredible to hear how much people have to say when it comes to how their own life and livelihoods are impacted by climate change. I've been able to be in the room with people from all different industries and walks of life and hear about their concerns and challenges when it comes to climate change, and I feel like they have a lot more to say about adaptation and resilience than they do about mitigation and reducing emissions. I would say that with all of those conversations, my biggest lesson has really been that relationships are the most important piece. It creates the foundation, so that when opportunities like this grant arise, we we have the foundation, and we can actually just hit the ground running and start delivering.
Lance Davisson: What has been wonderful about CSCI is that it, to Eve's point, has given us the ability to deliver on our promises. We've been focusing on the nature-based solutions piece over the last six years, so we've been investing in thinning trees to improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk. We've been investing in planting riparian areas along the river that help with flooding impacts and also with fish habitat. The fishery here is really important for tourism and community health. We're also planting trees in the urban area. We're really excited to get to know our other cohort communities better and just keep serving. We've got to continue doing this work across the valley for years and years to come to really have the impact that we've kind of gotten people invested in. Another on the ground piece that it's important to understand in the Valley: so there's several small cities. So there's City of Sun Valley, City of Ketchum, City of Bellevue, and City of Hailey. So we work with all those cities, like Eve mentioned, and then there's also the ski hill and a lot of other entities within the community that we work with. The piece that I think is important to understand with the climate in the Valley: it is a high mountain valley, so our windows of time to get work done on the ground are late spring until it gets too hot in the summer, and then in the fall before the snow flies. So we have kind of two field windows that we can get a lot of work done. So with this project, we're going to be planning and getting the projects identified on the ground over the winter, and then come springtime, we're going to get that project work done as quick as we can before it gets too hot to do work.
Eve Preucil: We also have--City of Cary is in Blaine County, but they're very small, so don't usually have a lot of bandwidth for working on projects like this.
Dan Bresette: Well, in the case of Carrie, it's good that there are so many other partners to help distribute that workload. This is amazing. We love nature-based solutions here at EESI, we love natural climate solutions. One quick follow up: when you're actually out in the field, or your teams are out in the field, who's actually doing the work?
Lance Davisson: That's a great question, and it's a combination of both paid staff and volunteers. So Wood River Land Trust is one of those organizations that's doing that work on the ground. There's lots of others, including Project Big Wood, an organization called Future Roots Trails Coalition. So what we do is we, as a planning team we identify what are the high priority projects that align well with CSCI and align well with the efforts of the Blaine County Climate Action Team. And then we will award those based off of the highest need on the ground to accomplish reducing urban heat, improving riparian restoration, addressing flood issues. So there are lots of organizations out there that do it. It's also very important, if we can, to involve volunteers with that as well, because of that community cohesion and the community connections. So to answer your question, it's a combination of both, but also the work on the ground needs to go through the county permitting process as well to make sure, to your point, that we're not damaging the resource while we're doing the work on the resource. Thank you so much, Dan.
Eve Preucil: Thank you. It's been great to be here.
Dan Bresette: Hannah, you're back. I know you've listened to all of the interviews that Susan and I did with Liz and with the teams from Floyd County, Kentucky and Blaine County, Idaho. Thanks for joining me at the end of the episode to close things out. Thanks to Susan for joining me for those interviews. It was great to get a chance to feature her on the podcast. This is a really, really good episode, I thought, tons and tons of interesting stories about the hard work that's being done in Floyd County, in Blaine County, to help people become more resilient and their communities become more resilient, and natural systems becoming more resilient. Hannah, why don't I start with you? What was your takeaway as you stitched together this whopper of an episode?
Hannah Wilson-Black: Yeah, I think this episode is going to be a great resource for adaptation professionals, local governments, nonprofits, and federal workers. Since climate resilience is an urgent need for every community, while the most extreme possible effects of climate change are not inevitable, some major effects certainly are, as we've learned from Floyd and Blaine counties today, and we have to remember that we have a choice when it comes to our reaction to extreme weather. We can remain underprepared, or we can fund, plan and implement resilience projects that take cues from the natural world and how it already operates.
Dan Bresette: I totally agree. In other words, we can build climate smart communities. I also am just very impressed with how the Climate Resilience Fund is really meeting these localities where they are. You know, we talked to the Floyd County team about where they are in their journey. We talked to the Blaine County, Idaho team about where they are in their journey, very different places. And I think it's very impressive that the Climate Resilience Fund is able to put together a program that really supports communities along the entire spectrum of readiness and preparedness to deal with climate resilience challenges. I think that's very impressive. I'm really pleased that we were able to feature two teams, one at the beginning and one a little bit later, towards the implementation stage. I think that's my main takeaway.
Hannah Wilson-Black: Yeah, that's great. I agree. And thank you to the Climate Resilience Fund folks for helping us out with this episode. If you want to learn more about EESI's work on climate resilience, head to our website at eesi.org Also follow us on social media @eesionline for all of our recent updates. Please make sure to follow The Climate Conversation on Spotify, Amazon, and Apple podcasts and give it a rating or review and share it with your friends who need this information too. The Climate Conversation is published as a supplement to our bi-weekly newsletter Climate Change Solutions. Go to eesi.org/signup to subscribe. Thanks for joining us and see you next time!
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