Community as an equal partner for region-based climate change vulnerability, risk, and resilience assessments

Understanding and planning for climate change is a complex systems problem that is interdisciplinary and requires place-based and impact-specific management practices for communities to become resilient to a changing environment. The greater Charleston Harbor region is highly susceptible to the projected impacts of climate change due to low lying geography, a strongly bimodal socioeconomic spectrum, and invaluable coastal ecosystem services. Using Charleston as an example community, this paper discusses a selection of increasingly holistic approaches used in developing a system-level, community-focused assessment for vulnerability, risk, and resilience that aim to enable community involvement in the assessment of and planning for climate change-induced severe weather events, more extreme temperatures, and sea level rise.