ART Engagement Exercises

Early on in your adaptation planning project, learn about what your stakeholder working group members care about and find to be critical for the economy, public health and safety, community and environment in the project area. Within the ART Program, these are called functions and values.

The process of identifying these functions and values as a group can help to clarify the purpose and focus of the project for all participants. The functions and values themselves serve as the basis for the project's resilience goals, which provide a way to obtain agreement on the main objectives of the project,and will help shape later project decisions about adaptation responses.

This exercise is helpful for scoping and organizing your project.

In this exercise, the project team and working group collectively explore landscape conditions and geographic and functional relationships among assets within the project area.

Through visiting multiple sites in the project area, the project team, asset managers and others actively participating in the project, together consider geographic and functional connections among different shoreline assets.

This exercise is useful for doing the project assessment

In this exercise, project participants explore the underlying causes and components of climate vulnerability, including relationships and dependencies among different assets that contribute to vulnerability.

Beginning with an (actual or hypothetical) asset, stakeholders identify and discuss characteristics that contribute to its vulnerability to selected impacts, such as sea level rise and storm events. Participants are asked to identify the relationships and dependencies with other assets and services and repeat the exercise for one or two of these connected assets and services to understand how they too may be directly and indirectly vulnerable to impacts.

This exercise is useful for summarizing project findings.

In this exercise, participants gain familiarity with the components of an adaptation response and provide feedback onthedraft adaptation responses that have been developed for the project area.

Within an open house format, project participants learn about, discuss and provide input (detailed and general) on actions, actors, implementation processes and other components of the responses.

This exercise is useful for developing adaptation responses.

This exercise helps build capacity among decision-makers and other stakeholders using collaborative problem-solving to understand and consider the relevance of your adaptation planning project’s outcomes for policy and funding decisions and planning priorities.

This exercise is useful for developing adaptation responses.