<<Back to Planning for Resilience
Campus Resilience Plans
The following campuses have completed exemplary plans to increase their ability to adapt to climate change. Campuses in the midst of creating their own resilience plans can learn from the planning process, action steps, and community engagement evident in these plans. Each example plan contains unique ideas or approaches that can aid institutions in their resilience planning and implementation.
| Campus | Campus Type | Highlight | Links |
| Rochester Institute of Technology | Masters College; Mid-size City | This plan is helpful for ideas about growing self-sufficiency. It has a chapter devoted to resilience, and details the campus relationship with the City of Rochester. | Climate Action Plan |
| Temple University | Doctorate Granting; Urban | This plan includes detailed metrics and goals for a variety of topics. It is campus-focused, but makes use of planning done by the City of Philadelphia, making it a model of working off of existing plans. | Climate Action Plan |
| Southern Connecticut State University | Masters College; Mid-Size City | This plan focuses on action steps and goals to increase resilience through projects such as food security, as well as involving students in the planning and implementation. | Climate Action Plan |
| Central Community College | Associates College; Large Town, Rural State | This plan resulted from four unique resilience assessments across three campuses, displaying how the goals of many stakeholders can be melded to create a comprehensive plan. | Climate Action Plan |
City Resilience Plans
Many cities have already created plans to increase preparedness and adaptation to climate change. While campuses will likely be planning for resilience on a much smaller scale than cities, they can look to these plans for best practices in the assessment and planning process, examples of action steps to increase resilience, and ideas for implementation partners. The following city plans were chosen as examples because they each offer an idea, concept, or approach that can help schools with their resilience planning and implementation.
| City | City Type | Highlight |
| New York City, NY | Coastal | This plan is helpful for ideas on detailed metrics and goals that make resilience achievable; this can help schools get ideas for the kinds of metrics and action steps to include in their own plans. |
| Boston, MA | Coastal, 100 Resilient Cities | This plan frames all metrics and goals around social and racial equity, as opposed to environmental sustainability or climate change. The plan still addresses these issues, but it treats the inequitable impacts of climate change as the impetus for doing so. |
| Cleveland, OH | Inland | This plan comes up with unique action steps that many other plans did not think of; many are about community engagement and easily implementable in schools. Examples include climate fairs, Green Party Crasher Program, and climate ambassadors. |
| Madison, WI | Inland | This plan integrates federal and state policies into the resilience action steps. While campuses will plan on a smaller level, this macro-level analysis is still important to consider–especially if schools receive federal funds. |
| Los Angeles, CA | Coastal, 100 Resilient Cities | This plan is designed for its residents to read; it uses accessible language, has a “how to read an action” guide, and is framed in such a way as to convince its’ audience of the importance of resilience. This language and approach could be helpful on college campuses as well. |
| Philadelphia, PA | Inland, ICF International | This plan offers ideas of how to combat vulnerabilities to resilience. It offers ‘Existing Resilience Efforts’ for each major metric (flooding, extreme heat, etc..). Schools can use these ideas to help brainstorm their own solutions. |
Thank you to Climate Programs Interns Valerie Weiner and Cass Michaud for compiling this list.