Climate adaptation planning should not require a six-figure consulting contract. Yet for most small and mid-sized communities in the Pacific Northwest, the tools and methodologies needed to assess climate vulnerability, prioritize adaptation investments, and measure outcomes are either prohibitively expensive or locked behind proprietary platforms.
Today, TerraFuture is releasing the Climate Adaptation Toolkit, a free, open-source resource that any community can use to develop a rigorous, data-driven adaptation plan. The toolkit is the product of three years of development, testing across 8 pilot communities, and feedback from over 200 practitioners.
Why This Toolkit Exists
A 2024 survey by the Oregon Association of Counties found that 72 percent of Oregon counties have not completed a formal climate vulnerability assessment, and 84 percent cited lack of staff capacity and technical expertise as the primary barriers. Among cities, the numbers are similar: 68 percent of Oregon cities with populations under 50,000 have no climate adaptation plan.
This is not because these communities are uninterested. It is because the existing tools assume a level of technical capacity, data access, and financial resources that most communities do not have. Federal tools like the US Climate Resilience Toolkit provide excellent information but limited decision-support functionality. Commercial climate risk platforms can cost 50,000 to 200,000 dollars per engagement. Academic frameworks are rigorous but often require specialized expertise to implement.
Our toolkit fills the gap between federal information resources and commercial consulting engagements. It is designed for use by community planning staff, local nonprofits, and engaged residents with no specialized climate science background.
What the Toolkit Contains
The toolkit has four modules, each designed to be used independently or as part of a sequential planning process.
Module 1, Vulnerability Assessment, guides users through a structured process for identifying climate hazards relevant to their community, assessing exposure and sensitivity across 12 sectors including infrastructure, public health, water resources, ecosystems, and agriculture, and evaluating adaptive capacity based on institutional, financial, and social resources. The module includes pre-populated hazard data for all Oregon counties drawn from Oregon Climate Change Research Institute projections, FEMA flood maps, and wildfire risk assessments.
Module 2, Community Engagement, provides templates, facilitation guides, and survey instruments for gathering community input on climate priorities. We tested 14 different engagement formats during the pilot phase and included the 6 that produced the highest quality input with the broadest participation.
Module 3, Adaptation Action Prioritization, uses a multi-criteria decision analysis framework to help communities rank potential adaptation actions based on effectiveness, cost, co-benefits, equity impacts, feasibility, and urgency. The framework accommodates both quantitative data and qualitative community input.
Module 4, Monitoring and Evaluation, provides standardized metrics and data collection templates for tracking adaptation progress over time. Metrics are aligned with Oregon's Climate Adaptation Framework and the federal National Climate Assessment indicators.
Climate adaptation is too important and too urgent to be gatekept by cost or technical complexity. Every community deserves the tools to protect its residents, and those tools should be free.
Pilot Testing Results
We piloted the toolkit with 8 communities across Oregon, ranging from the city of Astoria on the coast with a population of 10,000 to the city of La Pine in Central Oregon with a population of 2,600 to the Warm Springs reservation. Pilot communities completed vulnerability assessments in an average of 12 weeks using existing staff, compared to 6 to 12 months for consultant-led assessments.
Post-pilot evaluation showed that all 8 communities identified at least 3 adaptation priorities they had not previously considered. Six of the 8 have since incorporated toolkit outputs into their comprehensive plans or capital improvement programs. The average cost to implement the toolkit, primarily staff time and community engagement expenses, was approximately 8,400 dollars per community.
Technical Details
The toolkit is hosted on GitHub under an MIT open-source license, allowing unrestricted use, modification, and redistribution. Core components include a spreadsheet-based vulnerability scoring system compatible with Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, GIS-ready data layers in GeoJSON format, print-ready facilitation guides in English and Spanish, and a web-based dashboard template built on open-source frameworks.
We are committed to maintaining and updating the toolkit for at least five years, with annual data updates and biannual methodology reviews informed by user feedback and advancing climate science.
Any organization wishing to implement the toolkit can access it at our website. TerraFuture also offers free onboarding webinars monthly and maintains a community of practice forum where users share experiences and troubleshoot implementation challenges.
