3 Climate-Resilient Amenities Your Community Can Fight For

Climate change is inevitable, if you haven’t heard. In fact, it’s already happening. In times like these, trying to figure out how to help can be overwhelming. If corporate greed, bad policy, and structural violence are to blame, then why is the weight on our shoulders?

Perhaps a better way to look at the situation is through a more local lens. Instead of putting all of your eggs in the global basket, it might feel more fulfilling to also direct action towards your own neighborhood.

Things like community recycling programs, renewable energy infrastructure, and water conservation efforts are popular forms of local action, but there’s an even better way to invest in our communities:

Climate resilience projects.

If we know the climate is already changing, it’s too near-sighted to focus only on prevention. Our communities need to start evolving to serve us better as the world gets warmer and weather takes a turn for the extreme.

So, what is climate resilience? According to the Union of Concerned Scientists,

Climate resilience is about successfully coping with and managing the impacts of climate change while preventing those impacts from growing worse.

So, basically, it’s making sure our infrastructure is able to handle the symptoms of a changing climate — like extreme heat, droughts, and floods — while simultaneously making efforts to lower harmful emissions.

Scroll down to discover three hallmarks of climate resilience you can advocate for in your own community.

1. Green space

Green spaces cover a lot of bases. And no, I’m not talking about big, green yards (we’ll get to density later). I’m talking about patches of land in cities that serve as an oasis from heat, help mitigate flooding, and host native plant species.

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