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Rural Community Climate Resilience Roadmap

The Cabinet Resource Group partnered with 350 Montana, the Kootenai Climate Group, and Climate Cafe Polson to host a rural community climate resilience roadmap. This community engagement project brought Kyle Bocinsky with the Montana Climate Office, Pam Whitney with the Missoula Infectious Disease Program, and Robin Kelson with Abundant Montana on a three day roadshow to rural communities to discuss climate resilience. The roadshow also facilitated a community adaptation mapping exercise to identify environmental risks, sensitivities, assets, and adaptive capacity to help guide future community actions.

Rural communities are highly dependent on natural resources that are affected by climate change. These communities also face particular obstacles in responding to climate change that increase their vulnerability to its impacts. Montana’s rural economies and community cohesion are directly dependent on natural systems, subsequently vulnerable to climate change. Increasing wildfire severity, decreasing snowpack accumulation, reduced streamflow late in the season, warming trends, drought, severe weather events, and climate volatility are already impacting Montana communities.

Montana rural communities face considerable risk to their infrastructure, quality of life, and livelihoods. Climate change will severely challenge Montana rural communities, shift economic activity, and limit their capacity to thrive. Commodities, value-added crops, and recreational activities will be at risk due to changes in seasons, temperatures, and precipitation. Our economic viability is threatened. Our community's stability will be stressed.

Community climate resilience is a two-fold practice of adaption to existing changes and mitigation to reduce future harm. The Rural Community Climate Resilience Roadmap (RCCR Roadmap) was an experimental and experiential endeavor to explore an alternative way of engaging rural communities about climate resilience. In particular, the focus was on exploring rural community adaptive capacity through resiliency mapping.