Collaborate Climate

Integrating resilience thinking into operations and systems on campus through eight dimensions of resilience.

This project began as a climate resilience plan for UMass Amherst, which would document specific actions the university could take to better prepare, adapt, and respond to climate hazards. Partway into the project, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, put the project on hold, and led to campus leadership reconsidering what was needed to build resilience across operations and systems on campus. 

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As a result, the scope of the project pivoted to creating a framework that would help departments, offices, initiatives, and the university as a whole, integrate resilience thinking into decision-making. The project team worked with a task force made up of faculty, staff, and students to: 

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• Gather input and insight from the campus community through interviews led by graduate students, participatory mapping, a campus survey, open house, and workshop;

• Identify campus resilience goals and metrics for measuring resilience across a set of five focus areas;

• Develop a resilience framework that draws on peer-reviewed literature and practice-based frameworks for evaluating different dimensions of resilience;

• Conduct tests of the framework among campus offices and student leadership groups;

• Build an ArcGIS StoryMap with guidance and downloadable worksheets for implementing the framework across departments, offices, or planning initiatives.

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The resulting Resilience Framework looks at eight different dimensions of resilience (e.g., redundancy, diverseness, learning capacity, etc.) across the campus's five focus areas: 

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1. Health and wellbeing

2. Infrastructure and ecosystems

3. Local and campus community

4. Social equity and governance

5. Leadership and strategy

In using the framework, campus departments, offices, and initiatives answer specific planning questions -- tied to each dimension of resilience and the focus area goals -- to identify gaps and strategies for building resilience in their operations and systems.​

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