Adaptation at the municipal scale in the US Mountain West: What drives action in the face of weather and climate-related hazards?

Lisa Dilling (1,2,3,4), John Berggren (1,2,3), Ashwin Ravikumar(5), Krister Andersson(1,6)

Abstract
Cities are key sites of action for developing policies on adaptation to climate change. Recent research has focused on barriers to adaptation and documented the lack of adaptation implementation despite recognition of the importance of the issue at the international and national scale. Given the research already underway on barriers to adaptation, we chose to focus instead on the drivers of adaptation—why communities choose to take adaptive action. Because many communities are not yet engaged with climate change adaptation, we instead chose to focus on adaptation to existing natural hazards, such as floods, droughts, blizzards, and the like, as a analog for understanding the drivers of adaptive behavior toward climate change risks. We studied U.S. municipalities in the intermountain west states of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. These municipalities experience extreme climate events such as flooding, droughts, wildfire, blizzards, hailstorms, and tornadoes on a regular basis, some more recent examples being the Black Forest Fire and the 2013 Front Range Floods. To assess responses and planning to natural hazards and extreme events in the region, we conducted face-to-face and phone interviews with multiple key informants in a randomly selected sample of 60 municipalities with populations over 10,000. We asked about the perception of risk of weather and climate-related hazards, past events, responses taken (if any), planning activities, and the role of informal community groups, state and national policies, and other influences on municipal actions. We find that communities do indeed take a variety of actions in the face of weather- and climate-related risks, but that no single driver can explain differences in these actions. Rather, different drivers seem to correlate with different types of actions taken, and we suspect that combinations of drivers are necessary for adaptive action.