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Central Puget Sound Region, WA Pilot Community

Completed

Regional focus

North America

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The Central Puget Sound Region was a Resilient America pilot community from 2015 to 2018, and the Puget Sound Regional Council was Resilient America's primary partner. Climate risks and impacts was the primary focus of the partnership, and a major activity was a survey of local jurisdictions about their climate risks and challenges, and community meetings with local jurisdictions for more in-depth discussions about specific climate risks, needs, and priorities, and ways that the PSRC could support their efforts.

About Past Events

Description

The Central Puget Sound Region was a Resilience America pilot community from 2015 to 2018. The Central Puget Sound Region is located along the northwest coast of Washington State. The region faces a variety of natural and manmade hazards including earthquakes, snow, ice, extreme cold, landslides, transportation incidents, infrastructure failures, tsunamis, volcanic hazards, fires, excessive heat, floods, and windstorms. Resilient America’s key partner in the region was the Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC) whose membership includes representatives from 88 jurisdictions in King, Snohomish, Pierce, and Kitsap counties. The partnership focused on climate change impacts in communities. PSRC is a metropolitan planning organization for the Central Puget Sound Region that represents cities, counties, transit agencies, ports, tribal governments and the state; it works to ensure a thriving region through planning for regional transportation, growth management, and economic development.

Timeline of Resilient America activities in the Puget Sound region:

  • May 2015: Kick-off meeting
  • September 2015: Resilient America Roundtable holds its biannual meeting in Seattle and meets with local stakeholders
  • March 2016: The Resilient America Roundtable provides an overview of its work to the PSRC Transportation Policy Board
  • August 2016: Resilient America hosts the workshop, Building Resilience in the Puget Sound
  • November 2016: Resilient America facilitates a survey of jurisdictions in the Central Puget Sound region to learn about local jurisdictions’ goals, priorities, and challenges around climate preparedness and resiliency
  • December 2016: Site visits (Floodplain for the Future project and Green Everett Partnership with Forterra)
  • May and July 2017: Meetings with local jurisdictions in the Central Puget Sound region
  • January 2018: Resilient America co-hosts the Puget Sound Knowledge Exchange: Resources for Building Resilience

The ResilientAmerica and PSRC worked together to better understand climate risks and impacts in the region. As a starting point, the PSRC needed to better understand the extent to which local jurisdictions in the four counties were addressing their climate risks and building resilience to those risks, and what the PSRC could do to help local decision makers identify and integrate actions to build climate resilience into their future plans and efforts. Resilient America leveraged its relationship with the PSRC in its community engagement activities in the region to gather information about how local jurisdictions were addressing future climate impacts and climate resiliency and what challenges they faced in their climate resilience-building efforts.

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