Linking quality of life and climate change adaptation through the use of the macro-adaptation resilience toolkit Climate Risk Management

Climate change is affecting the quality of life and well-being of residents of U.S. communities and neighborhoods, posing a critical challenge for municipalities attempting to simultaneously address competing economic interests and public welfare concerns through climate adaptation policies. In response to this tension, this paper presents an innovative decision-making support toolkit — the Macro-Adaptation Resilience Toolkit (MART) — that is designed to explicitly address and overcome emerging tensions associated with community level climate adaptation policy development and ongoing and varied quality of life concerns of residents. In piloting the use of the toolkit in Miami-Dade County, we illustrate how climate adaptation can be situated within broader quality of life discussions with community stakeholders and formulate transformative strategies that could better align climate risk and adaptation and resilience actions with local quality of life issues. Findings from participant dialogues illustrate that socioeconomic inequalities of urbanization, such as gentrification, affect the kinds of climate risks that are considered of most concern to communities. Within this framework, participants formed transformational adaptation strategies that focused on improving quality of life in the long-term via conceptualizing large-scale shifts in the local governance, financing and economic structure thereby re-imaging daily life in the region. Grant no. NA15OAR4310147