Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness Summary

Town of Wareham
Community Resilience Building Workshop
Summary of Findings

Overview:
The need for municipalities, local and regional planning organizations, states, and federal agencies to increase resilience and adapt to extreme weather events and natural hazards has become strikingly evident among coastal Massachusetts communities. Recent events, such as the successive March 2018 nor’easters the brought serious wind damage and flooding to the area, have reinforced this urgency and sparked communities like the Town of Wareham to proactively plan for and mitigate potential risks to the Town through a community driven process. Once implemented, resilience building actions developed through this process will reduce the vulnerability of Wareham’s citizens, infrastructure, and ecosystems, and serve as a model for communities across the Buzzards Bay area, Massachusetts and the Nation.

In the winter of 2017-18, with funding from the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs Massachusetts Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness (MVP) Program, Wareham’s Planning Department contracted with the Woods Hole Group and Stantec to implement the Community Resilience Building process. A municipal-based core team was established to organize and implement an 8-hour Community Resilience Building (CRB) Workshop on May 3, 2018. The goal of this effort was to engage community stakeholders to facilitate the education, planning, and implementation of priority adaptation actions. The list of workshop invitees and workshop content was guided by input from an interdisciplinary working group comprised of Town staff and consultants from Woods Hole Group and Stantec. The Workshop’s central objectives were to:
• Define top local natural and climate-related hazards of concern;
• Identify existing and future strengths and vulnerabilities;
• Develop prioritized actions for the Community;
• Identify immediate opportunities to collaboratively advance actions to increase resilience

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