Climate resilience is not bound by state lines, so neither are we.
Regional Collaboratives are a critical element in the Climate Ready America system. They ensure it is a learning system that continually integrates lessons learned into ongoing efforts. These multi-state collaboratives bring climate experts together to solve regional challenges that impact communities across boundaries, like compound flooding, community-led relocation, and disaster recovery.
They support collaboration, share breakthroughs, and strengthen the entire system from the ground up.
What do Regional Collaboratives do?
When Climate Innovation Centers, Navigators, or regional climate service providers notice a pattern: a rising need, a persistent challenge, or an opportunity, they raise it to their Regional Collaborative. This is where shared concerns meet shared brainpower.
Working groups form to:
- Design regional-scale strategies
- Create resources that can be used across jurisdictions
- Rapidly circulate proven approaches back through Navigators, Climate Innovation Centers, and the Collaborative’s extensive networks
In the Southeast, for example, Regional Collaborative working groups are addressing:
- Compound flooding through improved modeling
- Community-led relocation
- Barriers to the use of best practices and nature-based solutions in floodplain management
- Resilience and disaster recovery reform
Future regions will address the challenges faced by communities in those areas.
Who is at the table?
Regional Collaboratives connect the people shaping climate resilience in real time, including:
- Local, state, and federal climate service providers
- Nonprofit partners and advocacy groups
- Indigenous and community leaders
- Academic and research institutions
- Navigators and Climate Innovation Centers
This mix ensures solutions are both grounded in science and tailored to on-the-ground realities.
A critical part of a national learning system
Climate Ready America is designed to grow quickly and adapt. Regional Collaboratives help make that possible.
Their work ensures that innovations do not get stuck in one location. They move. Fast. This bi-directional flow of insights means that what works in one community can benefit dozens or even hundreds more. And when new challenges emerge, Regional Collaboratives help shape the tools and strategies needed next.
This is what a responsive, community-centered climate system looks like.
The role of Geos Institute
Geos Institute coordinates and supports each Regional Collaborative. That includes:
- Recruiting and connecting experts across the region
- Facilitating resource sharing and best practices
- Ensuring equity, science, and local leadership guide all efforts
- Providing backbone support and structure to sustain the work
We help the system learn, and help it lead.
Help turn local insight into national action
The true power of Climate Ready America lies in its ability to learn and evolve. Regional Collaboratives make that possible, turning insight into action and local experience into national progress.
This is how we build a smarter, faster, and more responsive climate resilience system that scales solutions, centers equity, and helps the U.S. meet its goals to limit future global warming and adapt to the impacts that have already arrived.
For communities facing rising risks, and especially for those long left behind, Climate Ready America is the answer.
Arsum is the Senior Adaptation and Coastal Resilience Specialist for the National Wildlife Federation’s Southcentral Region. In this role, she advances climate adaptation efforts, with a focus on nature-based approaches to address the impacts of climate change and extreme events across the Gulf region. She has authored and co-authored numerous publications on climate impact assessments and adaptation solutions. Additionally, she regularly participates in state-based coastal resilience and hazard mitigation planning across the Gulf, collaborating with regional and local stakeholders.
Frank is the former President of the Reinsurance Association of America. Frank currently serves on the Advisory Board of the OECD’s International Network for the Financial Management of Large-Scale Disasters, the RAND Center on Catastrophic Risk Management and Compensation, and the University of Cincinnati’s Carl H. Lindner III Center for Insurance and Risk Management Advisory Board.
Jim is a multilingual world traveler. Based in Bavaria during the 1970s, Jim spent most of this period in India, Afghanistan and Nepal, where he founded and operated a charitable medical clinic serving Tibetan Refugees. He settled in Oregon in 1983 on a forested ranch in the Umpqua National Forest.
Dr. Micah Hahn is an Associate Professor of Environmental Health in the Institute for Circumpolar Health Studies at the University of Alaska-Anchorage. She received her joint PhD in Epidemiology / Environment and Resources from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MPH in Global Environmental Health from Emory University. Subsequently, she was a postdoctoral fellow for the CDC Climate and Health Program, and in this position worked collaboratively with the CDC Division of Vector-borne Diseases and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Her research focuses on understanding the health impacts of climate change and working with communities to develop locally-relevant adaptation and resilience-building strategies. Dr. Hahn is also on the Management Team of the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center.
Michael is a former Founding Principal of Resilient Cities Catalyst, a global non-profit helping cities and their partners tackle their toughest challenges. He is currently the Executive Director of Climate Resilience Academy at the University of Miami.
Dr. Quintus Jett is a consultant, educator, and strategist for public causes. He has a doctorate in Organizations & Management from Stanford University, and a two-decade faculty career which spans schools, departments, and programs of business, engineering, liberal studies, divinity, and public and nonprofit management. Following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Dr. Jett launched a volunteer project in New Orleans, which enlisted residents, students from over a dozen colleges and universities, and hundreds of others to field map the city’s Gentilly district, Lower Ninth Ward, and New Orleans East. Dr. Jett is an innovator in higher education, bridging the divide between academic research and the other priorities of the modern university, including student access and diversity, community engagement, and providing foundations for life-long learning in today’s rapidly changing world.
Scott is Monfort Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University. He has written about 100 publications in the peer-reviewed climate literature, is a former editor of the Journal of Climate, and served for five years as founding Science Chair of the North American Carbon Program.
Linda has many years of experience in disaster preparedness and resilience. She has been an elected official on the Linn County Iowa Board of Supervisors, Chair of the Metropolitan Planning Organization, the East Central Iowa Council of Governments, the statewide Mental Health Developmental Disability and the Linn County Board of Health. Langston is a former president of the National Association of Counties (2013-2014).
Ken works with families and organizations as a mediator, organizational consultant, trainer and facilitator. Along with his passion for helping people prepare for and reduce climate change, Ken also volunteers as a mediator through Mediation Works and is passionate about supporting youth through mentoring with Boys to Men of Southern Oregon.
Matthew is a retired high school teacher who was once honored as Oregon High School Social Studies Teacher of the Year. Before his teaching career he was in the restaurant business in Portland. He is also a lawyer who has been a member of the Oregon State Bar Association since 1980.
Andrea is the Resilience Policy Advisor for the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency. She works across state agencies and with local governments to increase the state’s resilience to the impacts of climate change.