About Resilient Connecticut

Vision

Create a regional coastal resilience plan for Fairfield and New Haven Counties. The plan will help establish resilient coastal communities with healthy buffering ecosystems and critical infrastructure that's adapted to withstand occasional flooding; critical services, infrastructure and transport hubs should be resilient and have strong connections. Increasing investment in identified "Resilience Zones" will provide an opportunity to increase economic resilience by strongly tying back to the regional transportation network and regional economic opportunities.

Goals and Objectives

Resilient Connecticut has several overarching objectives to achieve this vision:

  1. Increase coordination and collaboration between state and local governments, Councils of Governments, NGOs, utilities, business communities, and residents to integrate climate adaptation strategies across political boundaries and leverage across jurisdictional investments.
  2. Develop plans for New Haven and Fairfield Counties that will guide adaptation strategies and projects going forward; learning from and building on previous and ongoing adaptation planning efforts to create a planning framework that moves Connecticut beyond business as usual.
  3. Leverage CIRCA and UConn technical support and research on key questions related to climate adaptation.  Develop and demonstrate new modeling approaches and create tools and data that will support planning in Connecticut and beyond.
  4. Provide recommendations for a Connecticut Statewide Resilience Roadmap to help advance the capacity of a broad multidisciplinary community of practice in Connecticut. The following topics will be emphasized: state and local policy; resilient transit oriented economic development; innovative planning, design, and engineering approaches; science and research; communication and engagement.

Schedule and Scope

Resilient Connecticut will have 3 main phases beginning in Fall 2018 and running until Spring of 2022.

schedule-scope graph

Phase I of the project (Fall 2018 to Fall 2019) includes a comprehensive inventory and assessment of previous and ongoing resilience and adaptation efforts both here in Connecticut, as well as around the country and internationally. This research, along with consultation from the State Agencies Fostering Resilience (SAFR) and extensive stakeholder engagement, will inform the development of a Resilience Planning Framework. Work will involve a focus on neighborhood, town, and regional scales and will consider the vulnerability of all infrastructure systems with the goal of developing multi-scale strategies for resilience.

Phase II of the project (Fall 2019 to Fall 2020) will include a combination of regional and municipal scale planning activities as well as regional engagement and coordination across planning initiatives. During the Phase II process, a suite of projects with regional impact and significance will be identified and prioritized for site plan development in Phase III.

Phase III (Winter 2021 to Spring 2022) of the project will include site and implementation plan development, funding strategies, and a synthesis report that will document all project activities along with recommendations for a Connecticut Statewide Resilience Roadmap.