The California Resilience Implementation Accelerator is supporting high-impact, community-driven climate adaptation projects from planning toward implementation through seed funding grants, tailored technical assistance, and connections to aligned capital.
The Challenge
California’s communities are on the frontlines of climate change, confronting escalating threats from increasingly frequent extreme weather events. Despite growing urgency, communities face major barriers to advancing projects that reduce risks to communities, infrastructure, and natural systems, including limited funding and financing, complex regulatory environments, and fragmented institutional support. These challenges are further compounded by recent cuts to federal climate funding and state budget deficits, limiting the resources available to communities to turn climate adaptation plans into action and results. Without new models for implementation, the gap between planning and real-world resilience will continue to widen.
The Opportunity
The Accelerator is a multi-million dollar initiative designed to respond to the urgency of the moment, and built with the ambition to meet the speed and scale necessary for advancing resilience implementation across regions and at the state level in California. Launched in partnership with Resilient Cities Catalyst (RCC) and Climate Resolve, the initiative aims to move high-impact, community-driven projects from planning to implementation.
Accelerator Activities
Support coalitions of regional resilience partners and practitioners to maintain a project pipeline to sustain momentum and surface urgent prioritized resilience needs and opportunities for action at the regional and state level.
Provide tailored project support, including technical assistance and resources, to advance implementation, maximize resilience benefits, incorporate community leadership, and ensure long-term funding and financing mechanisms.
Coalesce and inform funders around coordinated strategy, including philanthropy and other funding/financing entities, to channel investments towards the most opportune and high-impact projects.
Drive California’s global leadership at the vanguard of adaptation and resilience that allows for testing and innovation, serving as a hub for resilience knowledge exchange and project scaling/replication across the state and beyond.