Researchers point to key community “capacities” as building blocks of resilience, including trusted sources of information, understanding of changing hazards, and an ability to derive lessons from prior disturbances and the financial resources to implement adaptive actions. We apply this resilience framework to our community engagement in Lake Charles, Louisiana as part of a five-year innovative program to create and fund natural infrastructure for flood protection and to provide expanded access to solar power during emergencies.  A central challenge is to convince stakeholders that the proposed collective actions will be effective and worth the investments. We tackle these challenges through three community engagement components:

Building Trust: The Community Co-Financed Flood and Energy Resilience Initiative (CCOFFER) project team will partner with a trusted local institution, the Community Foundation Southwest Louisiana, to gather data and insights concerning community priorities for climate resilience. 

Supporting Understanding of Risks: We will collect and provide responses to technical questions from the community concerning the CCOFFER program elements, such as land-value enhancement, natural infrastructure for flood protection, and solar-based strategies to increase power grid resilience. We will gamify a model that our team will develop to demonstrate expected reductions in flood risks associated with new natural infrastructure, such as sponge parks. 

Enhancing Adaptive Capacity: We will establish several avenues of the “co-production” of specific adaptations – including the placement of sponge parks to absorb flood water.  We will identify and examine “lessons learned” over the five years to replicate CCOFFER in other Gulf Coast communities.      

Ultimately, we seek to build trust, raise scientific understanding about natural infrastructure for flood control, and to support community members’ ability to evaluate the tradeoffs and to take action to enhance the overall resilience of their community.  We will gather input from the community stakeholders through the process described above to gain new insight into community priorities for resilience-building investments, more effective research translation methods, and to identify key influences on stakeholders' attitudes and willingness to support the type of collective adaptive actions our models suggest.  This window into public acceptance in Lake Charles will be invaluable, and the insights that we can gather should be generalizable to other Gulf Coast communities.