Progress and gaps in U.S. Adaptation policy at the local level

As climate impacts intensify, local governments across the United States are developing ad-hoc policies and plans to increase their resilience to climate hazards across all sectors, but there is limited assessment of what policies currently exist in U.S. communities to adapt to climate change. In this article, we develop a novel policy inventory for adaptation policies in five U.S. counties. Using a comprehensive definition of adaptation policy that includes policies that do not explicitly mention climate change, and a new taxonomy for coding these policies in a U.S. context, we identify 508 policies across these five locations. Through analysis of these policy inventories and interviews with local stakeholders, we identify four thematic policy gaps, as well as a major gap in policies to address extreme heat across all five locations. This first-of-its-kind climate policy assessment provides both a novel methodology to benchmark progress as well as recommendations for investment in local adaptation to climate change across the United States.