ICARP Climate Services
ICARP technical assistance, decision-support tools, guidance, and other adaptation and resilience resources
The Integrated Climate Adaptation and Resiliency Program supports California climate adaptation practitioners and communities by providing climate services such as actionable guidance, decision support tools, and technical assistance, including the following State-funded resources:
The Adaptation Clearinghouse (ResilientCA.gov) is a centralized database of information and resources to assist state, regional, and local decision makers and planners in planning and adapting to climate change. The Clearinghouse was established through Senate Bill 246 (Wieckowski, 2015) alongside the ICARP Technical Advisory Council to support integrated, science-based climate resilience decisions, planning, and implementation at all governance levels. Resources include example plans and projects, curated case studies, scientific studies, tools and data, guidance documents, and more. All resources can be explored and filtered by climate impact, geographic location, topics of interest, and other custom search features.
Cal-Adapt coordinated in partnership with the California Energy Commission and Strategic Growth Council, is the state’s online suite of resources that provide public access to climate data to support climate adaptation and resilience planning and decision-making. Cal-Adapt is the State’s open-source web platform for accessing high-quality, peer-reviewed downscaled climate data and projections from California’s Climate Change Assessments. Cal-Adapt helps practitioners visualize, understand, and use future climate impact data through a variety of tools and features, including projected changes in sea level rise, wildfire, temperature, precipitation, and more.
The Vulnerable Communities Platform is a new, integrated platform ICARP is building in 2022-2023 that will draw on many existing tools and datasets to help policy makers, agencies, and communities understand the underlying factors that contribute to vulnerability in the face of climate impacts. Although significant and mounting evidence conveys the unequal effects of climate change, no existing tool holistically displays the data needed to identify the communities most vulnerable to climate change in California. Those tools that do exist are not centralized or consolidated into a user-friendly platform, making it difficult to easily access the data and effectively inform policy action across various sectors and scales. Building on the vulnerable communities definition developed by the ICARP Council in 2019, and the work of community partners across the state, ICARP is developing this platform to accelerate equitable adaptation efforts. This platform will serve as a centralized source that will give community advocates, local governments, legislators and the State an easily accessible foundation to consider, analyze, and prioritize resilience and adaptation actions.
Planning and Investing for a Resilient California Executive Order B-30-15 directed State agencies to integrate climate change into all planning and investment, including accounting for current and future climate conditions in infrastructure investment. OPR convened a Technical Advisory Group to develop guidance to support implementation of the Executive Order.
The Technical Advisory Group (TAG) included members from nearly every State agency, local and regional governments, non-governmental and community-based organizations, and the private sector. The TAG met from April 2016 through January 2017 and produced a guidance document called “Planning and Investing for a Resilient California: A Guidebook for State Agencies.” This document provides high level guidance on what future conditions to plan for and how State agencies should approach planning differently in light of a changing climate.