Implementation Recommendations for Phase 1 of the FY22 CIROH1 Study: “Analysis and Demonstration of the National Water Models Applicability to Resilience Planning”
The Global Resilience Institute is partnering with CUAHSI and CIROH to inspire and guide communities across the United States to embrace the National Water Model to guide resilience planning in the face of water-related hazards exacerbated by climate change.
EXCERPT:
“In 2022 and 2023, resilience planning stakeholders were engaged from Burlington, VT; Cincinnati, OH; Portland, OR; Charlotte, NC; Boulder, CO; and Minneapolis; MN to better understand 1) how resilience planning operates in practice, 2) if and how the NWM could be applied to this work, and 3) how the National Water Center and NOAA could facilitate this use. The engagement with each community included a complementary set of interviews with NOAA/NWC staff, and concluded with a collaborative session where the community stakeholders and NOAA/NWC staff a co-generated set of recommendations for how the NWM could be used in resilience planning and how the National Water Center (NWC) could help facilitate this use. The project demonstrated that community engagement can play an invaluable role in improving climate services such as the NWM by allowing end-users to directly engage with the tool and offer feedback to improve its accessibility.
The key output from this study was a set of recommendations that can help NOAA improve the service delivery of the NWM to reach a wide range of new stakeholders engaged in resilience planning. These recommendations fall into four categories which are detailed in four tables; Hypothetical Use Cases (Table 1): Recommendations for how communities can use the NWM in their resilience-related planning efforts, Awareness (Table 2): Recommendations from the communities on how NOAA can increase awareness of the NWM as a tool for resilience planning, Accessibility (Table 3): Recommendations for how the NWC can make the NWM more accessible to a wider group of stakeholders, many of whom are not hydrologists, and Requested Capabilities (Table 4): Recommendations for additional features or capabilities to guide future enhancements to the NWM that communities identified as being potentially helpful in supporting their resilience planning efforts. ”