Why Climate Resilience Stalls — and how to fix it
This article originally appeared in Planetizen: https://www.planetizen.com/features/137250-why-climate-resilience-stalls-and-how-fix-it
By Joyce Coffee and Robert Macnee, PhD
When it comes to preparing cities for the disastrous impacts of climate catastrophes, there is a gaping chasm between ambition and implementation. Here’s what we’ve learned from spending our days trying to close it.
Picture a mid-sized city planning director sitting at her desk, surrounded by climate reports. She has access to sophisticated climate projections, hazard maps, vulnerability assessments, and risk models scattered across dozens of platforms, each requiring specialized expertise to interpret. However, what she needs to know is simple: Which neighborhoods flood first? What infrastructure is most vulnerable? What interventions would provide the greatest risk reduction within her budget?
In September 2024, this gap between information and action became catastrophic. When Hurricane Helene struck the Southeast, coastal communities braced for impact. But the storm's most devastating damage occurred hundreds of miles inland. Asheville, North Carolina, a city that had been actively planning for climate resilience and was considered a ‘climate haven,’ saw entire neighborhoods destroyed, critical water infrastructure fail, and communities cut off for weeks.
Ten months later, in July 2025, catastrophic flooding struck Texas Hill Country, another 1-in-1,000-year event, killing more than 100 people and causing $18-22 billion in damages. Like Asheville, this region had been identified as vulnerable to flash flooding, but the intensity exceeded design parameters for existing infrastructure.
The scale of the challenge
For every dollar spent on resilient infrastructure, $87 still goes into assets that ignore climate and nature risks. This isn't a failure of planning or will, it's a capacity problem. Implemented infrastructure doesn't match the scale and urgency of the challenge.
We work in climate resilience consulting, and over 25 years working with over 200 jurisdictions across the U.S. we’ve observed this gap from the inside. What follows are field observations about why translation from strategy to action fails, what capacity constraints are most binding, and what might actually help cities close the gap.
Asheville, North Carolina, USA — October 4th, 2024: Volunteers help clear debris from Hurricane Helene and salvage art outside Riverview Station in the River Arts District. Image: alongspring
Four structural disconnects
The implementation gap stems from four compounding structural disconnects:
Temporal mismatch: Climate projections assess risk on decadal timescales (2030, 2040, 2050), while implementation requires multiyear project cycles. By the time protective infrastructure becomes operational, the climate conditions it was designed for may have already shifted.
Technical integration challenge: Translating climate data into implementable designs requires synthesizing expertise across climatology, geospatial analysis, hydrology, engineering, and finance. Many municipal governments lack this integrated capacity.
Implementation timelines: Even when jurisdictions develop projects, planning phases, funding applications, environmental reviews, design, procurement, and construction typically span three to seven years, creating systematic delays between risk identification and actual protection.
Compounding costs of delay: Each year of inaction compounds physical and fiscal risks. Too often, local governments lack a ‘recovery playbook’ when disaster strikes, needing, in effect, a 911 tool for recovery planning.
The capacity crisis behind stalled implementation
Under Executive Order 14239 (March 2025), the federal approach to resilience now emphasizes decentralization, placing greater responsibility on states and local governments while limiting federal funding and technical assistance. This makes local capacity constraints even more acute. For local leaders, this shift is more than a policy change, it’s a capacity reality. Expectations for preparedness are rising even as many jurisdictions remain under-resourced, forcing communities to act with less support and greater urgency.
The gap between resilience planning and implementation isn't just about information or funding, it's fundamentally about capacity. Research consistently shows an “implementation deficit” in climate adaptation: strong on strategy development, weak on execution. Three binding constraints are:
Translating data to action: Climate action plans identify broad strategies, such as ‘enhance stormwater management,’ ‘retrofit vulnerable infrastructure,’ but often don't specify which infrastructure will flood at what rainfall intensities, what improvements would cost, what the cost-benefit ratio is, or which funding programs apply. This requires technical skills some cities lack and consulting budgets they can't afford.
Fragmented funding: Federal resilience funding flows through dozens of programs across multiple agencies like EPA's Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (WIFIA), HUD's Community Development Block Grant programs, and USDA's Emergency Watershed Protection, each with different eligibility criteria, application requirements, cost-share structures, and timelines. A single project might require coordinating multiple sources with separate applications, formats, and reporting.
Protracted timelines: From concept to completion of resilience actions typically requires 3-7 years. Meanwhile, infrastructure designed for 2020 conditions may be inadequate by 2027.
Hurricane Helene flooding in North Carolina. Image: NCDOTcommunications, via Wikimedia Commons
Where technology might help
A recurring question is whether technology can meaningfully close the implementation gap. What's clear is that the next generation of resilience tools must reorient from risk assessment toward solution delivery, shifting from 75 percent risk modeling to 75 percent solution building.
Other domains demonstrate how technology can reduce friction between expert knowledge and operational practice. Healthcare employs clinical decision support systems that reduce diagnostic error rates. Urban planning relies on GIS platforms that compress months of scenario analysis into days. Emergency management systems integrate real-time data to accelerate response protocols.
These share a common characteristic in that they reduce transaction costs in applying knowledge to solutions, without replacing human judgment. Similar approaches might help resilience implementation:
Making specialized knowledge accessible: Systems that make climate science, engineering, and finance expertise more accessible to generalist staff could help. But the gap between ‘giving information’ and ‘enabling good decisions’ remains. The challenge is making information useful in specific contexts for specific decisions. Technology that converts hazard data into clear, actionable departmental tasks, linking risk, cost, and funding, could bridge today's planning-implementation divide.
Accelerating peer learning: Cities reinvent wheels. Proven solutions exist elsewhere but aren't systematically accessible. Tools that help cities find analogous situations and understand what worked could drastically accelerate local adaptation.
Reducing administrative burden: Grant applications and compliance documentation consume staff time. Technology that automates repetitive steps, auto-populating forms, organizing data, generating draft reports, could free staff to focus on strategic decisions that truly advance resilience.
Integration with existing systems: Cities already use budget systems, project management tools, and GIS platforms. Adding another system creates more burden, not less. Software designed to connect rather than compete could weave resilience into daily municipal operations instead of keeping it siloed.
Critical design questions
Success depends on how supporting technology is designed: Can staff with limited technical training actually use it? Is pricing realistic for small city budgets? Do users understand how recommendations are generated? Does it support judgment or try to replace it?
For small and under-resourced cities, technology may be the most practical path forward. Digital associates, shared platforms, and AI-enabled planning tools can extend local capacity, helping staff identify priorities, design fundable projects, quantify ROI, and track progress. These aren't futuristic solutions; they're pragmatic ones, designed to give overstretched local governments the analytical power larger cities take for granted.
Five years from now, the marker of progress won't be how many climate plans exist. It will be how many projects have been built, how many people are better protected, how much risk has been measurably reduced, how many jurisdictions, especially small, under-resourced ones, have accessed needed support, and how much knowledge has been transferred and institutionalized.
That shift from planning to delivery demands a new model of support. The next era of resilience will belong to those who can act first, the governments that turn knowledge into action.
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JOYCE COFFEE is a nationally recognized resilience expert with more than three decades of experience and the founder of Climate Resilience Consulting, working with hundreds of public, private, and nonprofit clients to confront climate risk.
ROBERT MACNEE, PH.D., Deputy Director at Climate Resilience Consulting, is a climate strategist and communicator who helps make preparedness practical. He has worked with governments and nonprofits across the U.S., Europe, and East Asia.