Floodplains by Design: Introductory Guidance and Resources for the Integration of Climate Information in Floodplain Management

The adaptive co-management of a complex, socio-ecological system such as floodplains often requires a strategic and coordinated approach for achieving climate resilience. At the same time, the collaborative nature of Integrated Floodplain Management often involves a broad range of actors with varying perspectives on adaptation who must work within their own organizational mandates, regulatory domains and decision-making frameworks. Through an assessment of existing literature, this work draws on best practices to develop Introductory Guidance for effective climate adaptation in Integrated Floodplain Management. The goal of this guidance document is to provide floodplain practitioners in Pierce, Snohomish, and Whatcom counties with a shared language and understanding for addressing climate change. This includes sections on understanding exposure and sensitivity, building adaptive capacity, and integrating resilience-thinking into multi-scalar, multi-jurisdictional decision-making. This guide is part of a series of foundational documents that frame ongoing, collaborative discussions around identifying decision-relevant climate science and capacity-building needs for adaptive floodplain management on the Snohomish and Stillaguamish watersheds. This series includes a companion document that dives into more of the technical details around modeling and understanding climate data. Our findings point to the need to integrate adaptation thinking into current and ongoing work, rather than restructuring and developing new processes. Additionally, we emphasize that integrating climate change into floodplain management makes the work more enduring, comprehensive and effective. Healthy floodplains and watersheds are vital to our communities, ecosystems and economies in and around the Salish Sea. Integrating climate information into floodplain management helps to ensure that the decisions we make today are effective in our changing climate