Long-term Community Resilience Exercise Resource Guide

This video resource is a practical guide for using exercises to support climate adaptation planning and long-term community resilience. The content explains what climate adaptation is and shows how seminars, workshops, and tabletop exercises can be used to build partnerships, align community priorities, and improve preparedness planning. A major practical value of the guide is that it breaks climate adaptation exercises into core elements: objectives, scenarios, and discussion themes. It explains that objectives define the outcomes an organization wants to achieve, helping planners keep exercises focused and useful rather than abstract. The guide also encourages participants to examine potential economic impacts from climate-change-related hazards, integrate climate science data and information into current and future planning, and identify collaborative, flexible, and sustainable whole-community approaches. This is important because adaptation often fails when stakeholders cannot translate climate risk information into shared decision-making or investment priorities. The guide further highlights the role of coalitions in supporting adaptation and preparedness, showing that resilience is not only about one organization’s readiness but about coordinated social and institutional capacity. Another useful component is its treatment of scenarios and modeling across multiple time horizons, such as 20, 30, and 50 years, which helps communities visualize future climate impacts and test response options before crises occur. The guide also lists discussion themes that can be used in exercises, including environmental opportunities to enhance adaptation, social and cultural challenges, key economic areas at risk, and critical assets most vulnerable to climate threats. Because it is structured around practical exercise design, the resource is especially relevant for emergency managers, local planners, educators, and community resilience organizers who need a concrete method for engaging stakeholders and building preparedness capacity. It is less of a policy paper and more of an implementation tool for planning and training.