Inflation Reduction Act: NOAA Climate Resilience Regional Challenge

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The NOAA Climate Resilience Regional Challenge seeks to transform the resilience of U.S. coastal communities, ecosystems, and associated economies to weather and climate impacts. Applications submitted for both Track One and Track Two should consider the following program priorities in the development of their proposals: - Risk Reduction. Building resilience requires implementing adaptation actions that reduce risk to coastal populations, infrastructure, economies, and ecosystems from the impacts of drought, extreme heat, sea level rise, floods, and wildfires, and/or other future weather and climate impacts. For Track One, applicants should assess weather and climate risks and apply risk information to identity, plan and design future adaptation actions. For Track Two, applicants should propose a complementary set of adaptation actions (approximately three to eight) that collectively reduce risk by increasing community preparedness, decreasing community exposure, and/or improving community recovery. Proposed adaptation actions can include nature-based and hybrid green and gray actions. Those adaptation actions should provide co-benefits and alleviate multiple stressors within communities, such as improving public health, achieving reductions in pollution burden, enhancing habitat or other environmental benefits, and providing access to safe parks, natural areas, and waterways. Applicants must include metrics for risk reduction in their applications. - Regional Coordination and Collaboration. Regional coordination and collaboration, driven by an integrated, achievable, and ambitious vision for how to improve the resilience of the region, is critical to addressing weather and climate impacts. All applicants to both tracks should focus on ensuring that relevant entities are engage as collaborators and/or partners in building resilience across states, counties, cities, and Tribes within the region. Applicants should focus on the identification of shared needs, priorities, challenges, and strategies that can be addressed by actions at the local and regional scales. Successful applicants will support public engagement to inform planning efforts and build effective relationships between government entities and communities. - Equity and Inclusion. Inclusive and equitable adaptation strategies and actions require co-development with members of marginalized, underserved, and underrepresented communities to ensure that benefits flow to them. These adaptation strategies and actions should include Tribes, tribal priorities, and indigenous knowledge. - Enduring Capacity. Enduring capacity refers to sustaining a level of community readiness that promotes continuous adaptation to the impacts of weather and climate, including developing and maintaining specific workforce capabilities and capacities. All applicants to both tracks should focus on building capacity for adaptation that can be sustained into the future within the region (post-award period) including with community-based organizations and for marginalized, underserved, and underrepresented communities. Successful applicants will also propose efforts to extend anticipated benefits beyond their region through information sharing and transfer of knowledge to other regions. In addition to these program priorities, NOAA will consider other standard factors in evaluating the extent to which applications address these program priorities including: technical merit; qualifications of the applicant(s); project costs; and outreach an engagement (See Section V.A. for the Evaluation Criteria and weighting for Track One and Track Two). For additional information on the NOAA Climate Resilience Regional Challenge program, visit: https://coast.noaa.gov/funding/ira/resilience-challenge/.

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