Bay Area Businesses Launch Challenge to Fund Climate Resilience

The Bay Area Council, a business and economic policy organization, has launched the California Resilience Challenge to fund climate adaptation planning statewide.

The initiative builds on the $6 million Resilient By Design Bay Area Challenge from the Rockefeller Foundation, which wrapped up last month with nine winning ideas to address sea-level rise and flooding around the region. Now, the Bay Area Council is seeking to establish a permanent fund focused on implementation, which would make resilience planning grants available to communities around California. In a Planning Report interview with Council leaders Jim Wunderman and Adrian Covert, Covert explains:

What we learned in the course of this work in the Bay Area is that we need a sustainable funding source to get from concept to permitability. That is a problem for projects statewide. With the California Resilience Challenge, we are bringing together businesses and philanthropies to create a statewide fund from which communities around the state can apply for grants for climate change adaptation planning. This would be for the areas of fire, drought, and flood resilience, as well as resilience from extreme heat. We will be releasing more information at the upcoming Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, happening from September 12-14. For right now, folks who are interested in staying involved about the challenge and the RFP as it gets prepared should visit https://www.resilientcal.org/ and sign up for updates.

more on how business interests in the Bay Area are getting behind sustainability and resilience projects.