Chapter 1: Background

Cities and communities across the United States design and implement sustainability, climate change, and resilience plans to address existing and emerging environmental, economic, social, and cultural challenges and threats. The strategies, policies, objectives, goals, and other key elements included in the plans are often defined by characteristics such as climate, the presence of bodies of water, and population size. U.S. cities and communities can be grouped by these characteristics to analyze commonalities. On the other hand, an analysis can be performed beyond the sub-groups formed using characteristics such as climate zones, the presence of bodies of water, and population size. The analysis of the plans designed and implemented by cities and communities across the U.S. led to the development of the preparedness index and scale and the proposal of the sustainability, climate change, and resiliency dictionary. Similarly, common characteristics among groups and population centers allowed the identification of a series of patterns. Organizing the population centers' performance by climate zone, population size, and impact of bodies of water characterization or a combination of those factors revealed well-defined performance patterns of the population centers included in the study. Finally, three case studies analyze the use of indicators to assess progress toward achieving the pre-determined sustainability, climate change, and resiliency goals and objectives.