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With an increase in the climate change-linked frequency and intensity of severe weather events that affect electric distribution infrastructure, there is an urgent need to define power outage resilience and identify methods to assess and certify whether and how planning actions and project implementations have made communities more resilient. Accordingly, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center initiated the Clean Energy and Resiliency (CLEAR) program to provide technical services to nine community sites in the commonwealth, which formed the basis of a convenience sample for this study. A RAND team-comprising Converge Strategies, XENDEE, and Ridgeline Energy Analytics-conducted stakeholder interviews and a literature review to articulate power outage resilience metrics, piloted a certification program, and used focus groups to assess pathways to the CLEAR program's operationalization and administration.

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Urban stormwater management is a growing challenge in many U.S. cities. Continued population growth, urbanization, and inadequate investment in storm- and wastewater infrastructure have left many cities exposed to sewer overflows, stormwater flooding, and reduced water quality. Climate change is expected to add to this challenge by increasing the intensity or volume of rainfall from storms in many regions. There is also a growing acknowledgment that these vulnerabilities are environmental justice and equity challenges, as flooding and other negative outcomes disproportionately affect low-income or majority-minority neighborhoods. Pittsburgh's Negley Run watershed is a prime example of these stormwater management challenges, draining a diverse area of Pittsburgh's East End, including neighborhoods that have suffered heavily from underinvestment. It also represents an urgent flood-risk challenge in the city, as heavy rainfall in the area leads to regular flooding of a key road corridor. In this project, RAND researchers use simulation modeling to evaluate present and future risks in Negley Run from sewer overflows and flooding given future rainfall uncertainty. The authors then evaluate proposals for a phased series of green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) investments. In addition to estimating stormwater benefits and implementation costs, the authors provide economic estimates of recreational, amenity, and other cobenefits to local residents; compare total benefits to costs; and explore potential trade-offs. Results show that a centralized system of stormwater management in Negley Run could yield cost-effective sewer-overflow reduction, reduce street flooding, and provide positive net economic benefits across a range of assumptions about future rainfall and implementation costs.

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Green stormwater infrastructure has been increasingly used across the United States over the past few decades. In some locations, cities have invested heavily in this type of infrastructure to reduce urban flooding and manage water quality. Green stormwater infrastructure also offers a variety of co-benefits to the surrounding community compared with traditional gray infrastructure. These co-benefits include reduced urban heat island effect, improved water quality, and enhanced aesthetics. This report presents the results of an exploratory machine learning–based analysis of green stormwater infrastructure asset data across five cities in the United States. Within each city, authors evaluated the location of installed green stormwater infrastructure based on the demographic and land use characteristics of the surrounding area. The goal of this analysis was to understand the local context surrounding green stormwater infrastructure investments. This evaluation can help cities understand the current potential for co-benefits of these investments and how future planning could enhance the co-benefits of green stormwater infrastructure.

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The U.S. Coast Guard's motto is Semper Paratus — always ready. But for what? The service carries out 11 diverse statutory missions and must address both immediate needs and future contingencies, which makes this question difficult to answer. Future changes to the operating environment in the physical, economic, social, political, and technological domains promise additional stresses on service resources, in addition to changing the makeup of the service itself. One way to aid decisionmaking in the face of a deeply uncertain future is by more effectively leveraging the Coast Guard's Evergreen strategic foresight initiative. Analysts from the Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center adapted an approach to developing future scenarios and, in this report, present example components of Coast Guard global planning scenarios related to future service readiness. These posture the Coast Guard to better integrate slow-burning issues and problems that might emerge only down the road into nearer-term decisions that can help prepare the service for upcoming challenges. Without weighing the long view of changes in the operating environment alongside current or nearer-term demands, the Coast Guard will not be able to have full awareness of what blind spots might exist in current strategies and plans. Being ready for the spectrum of challenges the future might bring requires mindfulness of both the near and long terms and how change will affect the Coast Guard.

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Some U.S. communities, such as low-income or minority communities, are disproportionately affected by the impact of disasters. Distribution of both mitigation funding and recovery funding has not been equitably applied to all communities, with disadvantaged communities receiving less of both funds. Weather and climate disasters continued to escalate in 2021, resulting in billions of dollars in disaster costs and hundreds of fatalities in the United States. Predisaster mitigation is meant to lessen the damaging effects of future storms — thereby reducing the losses to both infrastructure and communities. The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program aims to help communities undertake predisaster mitigation to reduce natural hazard risk. In response to an executive order to address inequitable funding systems that impede progress toward community resilience, an explicit guiding principle of BRIC is to promote social equity and help members of disadvantaged groups. To track progress toward equitable outcomes, BRIC is in the process of developing equity evaluation methods. In this report, the authors describe the development of an equity action-logic model and example metrics. The relationship of community characteristics to participation and success in BRIC's first competitive cycle (fiscal year 2020) is examined. Recommendations address (1) how the BRIC program could evolve to track social equity outcomes in a meaningful way; (2) the value of integrated data sets and analytic methods for understanding the characteristics of communities that are applying for BRIC funding and those that are successful; and (3) the barriers disadvantaged communities face when applying for BRIC funding.