Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Climate Frog transitions to pResilience

Climate Frog is reincarnated as pResilience. If you're linked here or are getting a feed from here, please make the switch. You'll be glad you did. Thanks.

Climate Frog was my first effort at blogging about climate change and our responses to it as citizens, communities and governments. Since I began this blog in early 2007, the landscape has changed - both literally and scientifically - and so has my approach to blogging about it.

Over a year ago, I was curious about what - if anything - people were doing to prepare for the impacts that research was forecasting. I learned that those impacts would be specific to locations, not generalized across all locations. I went so far as to propose a business for building special purpose Web sites for use by local government in collaboratively planning to mitigate those impacts. I called the effort AdaptLocal and as some potential funders considered my proposal, I continued to inquire as to the likelihood that local governments would pay to have these sites set up for them.

Early this March, I came to the conclusion that very few local governments are currently ready to take such a step. Some might be, but most are buried in other more immediate obligations while struggling to fund even those priorities.

The driving force for local climate adaptation and building local resilience for approaching climate impacts will be the grassroots groups and organizers, not their local governments. There are exceptions, of course, and I've featured some of them here in Climate Frog, but I've concluded that the most useful purpose I can serve is to find and blog about the best examples of local organizing. And that's what pResilience is all about.