The U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit: evidence of progress

The U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit ( toolkit.climate.gov ) is a federal website, launched in 2014, designed for state and local decision makers to bolster capacity for resilience to climate-related hazards. We document the development, conceptual foundation, and evolution of this toolkit to illustrate how to put data and tools into context for decision makers, namely by framing climate resilience within risk management, focusing on end users’ stories, and engaging directly with users. As this is the first effort to bring together multiple federal agencies’ tools, data, and case studies into a decision support platform, most attention has been given to framing climate adaptation and resilience. To that end, we introduce the Steps to Resilience, which incorporate risk management and decision making for climate-related hazards. The site structure and content support that framework. We introduce a five-part “Quality of Relationship” metric that helps our team define and measure success via the website and via engagement with end-users. Our results provide avenues for developers of similar toolkits to meaningfully present climate science to adaptation professionals and the decision makers they serve.