The Challenge
The ResilientMass website is the Commonwealth’s initiative for building statewide capacity for climate change adaptation and resilience. This site hosts the ResilientMass Plan, which integrates hazard mitigation and climate adaptation planning, identifying strategies and actions state agencies will take to address risks to human health and safety, communities, critical assets and infrastructure, natural resources, governance, and economy of the Commonwealth. Visitors can also identify and access climate data, maps, featured websites, tools, and documents relevant to climate resilience across Massachusetts.
The goal of the website is to inform the public and policy decisionmakers about the Commonwealth’s resilience strategy and programs, to track progress on state-led resilience actions, and to streamline the decision-making process to plan and prepare for climate change impacts. The ResilientMass site also helps users identify climate vulnerable areas and evaluate the risks posed by climate change; and develop local strategies and implementation plans.
Project Scope
The EEA Climate Team has been working with its web vendor to make strategic improvements and enhancements to the web portal for the state’s climate resilience initiative, ResilientMass.
The FY23 scope included implementing a new site menu compliant with Executive Office of Technology Services and Security standards to enable a URL and logo change to “resilient.mass.gov,” applying mobile responsiveness throughout the website, addressing critical maintenance and enhancements of the Climate Resilience Design Standards Tool (CRDS Tool), and developing and launching a new web-tool (Guides for Equitable and Actionable Resilience, GEAR) to support the Municipal Vulnerability Program’s (MVP’s) revamped planning grant process, MVP 2.0. Additional backend improvements to the content and menu management systems were made to give Climate Team more autonomy over future website updates. FY23 updates to the CRDS Tool included maintenance/troubleshooting in response to user feedback of performance glitches, and developing guidance for project evaluators (e.g., grant program managers, MEPA staff).
In FY24, the ResilientMass Plan Action Tracker was designed and deployed. This tracker is maintained by the inter-agency ResilientMass Action Team (RMAT) and contains a list of actions identified through the 2023 ResilientMass planning process. The tracker is updated periodically to reflect progress in implementing these actions. Additionally, outdate and/or legacy pages were removed from the website, and the ResilientMass Resource Clearinghouse was redesigned with deployment to the public slated for early FY25. This resource clearinghouse will host climate resilience resources including grant deliverables, municipal vulnerability plans, and resilience case studies.
Updates to the CRDS Tool were also advanced in FY24 and included adding project maps for a second coastal design criteria from the Massachusetts Coast Flood Risk Model (MC-FRM) and projected heat values featured on the Maps and Data Center in the appropriate spot on the Project Output page and Project Report. Additional bug fixes and performance improvements were also addressed. The deployment for these updates to the public are slated for early FY25.
Goals and Intended Resilience Benefits: These efforts will ensure the usability, accessibility, and critical, strategic enhancements of the interactive web platform that enables EEA to provide Massachusetts climate change data, maps, and resources to municipalities, state agencies, local organizations, and businesses, helping them understand and plan for climate impacts, vulnerabilities, and adaptation strategies.
Further, the MVP GEAR application is an accessible and engaging tool that will support communities in evaluating vulnerabilities, identifying actions, and building community resilience in equitable and transformative ways. GEAR streamlines available climate data and projections, census data, and other demographic and geospatial data to support the identification of vulnerabilities and actions. GEAR also provides high level guidance to communities, and particularly to municipal staff, in ways to use the tool’s data and information to create projects and processes that build community resilience, particularly through collaborative governance, environmental justice, and nature-based solutions.
The ResilientMass Resource Clearinghouse aims to provide a database of resources for any end user interested in learning more about climate resilience, especially in the state of Massachusetts. This new Clearinghouse features an intuitive filtering and search system that will allow users to easily find the resources they are searching for. Additionally, the new Resource Clearinghouse will host many more Massachusetts-specific resources and grant deliverables that are not currently accessible to the public through the current Clearinghouse.
Ongoing maintenance and performance improvements to the Climate Resilience Design Standards Tool is critical, both as newer data becomes available but also due to increasing use of the tool to inform grantmaking across state government, the annual state capital investment process, and the MEPA project review process.
Metrics
Through the MVP 2.0 pilot process, feedback has been gathered on how to enhance and improve the Guides for Equitable and Actionable Resilience (GEAR) tool. These suggestions for the mapping component of GEAR included accessibility improvements such as larger text and color variation, as well as the ability for end users to add their own localized data for analysis. These improvements are slated for FY25.
While the website does not currently collect detailed user analytics, this improvement is also slated for FY25. The website does feature a simple end-user experience ticket, but this does not provide enough information for the website managers to implement improvements. This is a major gap in website experience that will be addressed in the upcoming year and will allow customization and tailoring of the website to end user needs. The current system allows the team to track comments or questions submitted via feedback button (standard mass.gov form), or the info.resilientma@mass.gov and rmat@mass.gov help inboxes.
Results and Outcomes
Overall, the Guides for Equitable and Actionable Resilience (GEAR) tool has received positive feedback from communities participating in the MVP 2.0 pilot process. End users agreed that the tool assisted them in identifying climate vulnerable priority populations in their communities for engagement that they were previously unaware of. Additionally, feedback was received that the tool helped point end users towards additional climate resilience tools and resources.
Climate Resilience and Design Standards Tool enhancements and guidance developed in FY23-24 have helped mitigate the volume of help tickets received via the rmat@mass.gov inbox and strengthened evaluation of climate vulnerability and resilience for A&F’s capital investment plan submittals, grantmaking across multiple state programs, and project evaluation during the MEPA review process.
The ResilientMass Plan Action Tracker has also received positive end-user feedback, including interest from other agencies and municipalities who are hoping to implement similar trackers for their own initiatives.
The overall ResilientMass website has received positive feedback and acclaim. Several other states have connected with the EEA team managing the ResilientMass website for informational interviews and advice on how to advance climate communications, including website engagement and management, in their own states. Additionally, the website was featured on ESRI’s blog in February of 2024: Massachusetts Bolsters Resilience with Accessible Climate Data and Tools (esri.com), which was eventually picked up and featured in the GIS Magazine “GeoSpatial World” in April of 2024: Massachusetts Bolsters Resilience with Accessible Climate Data (geospatialworld.net). The website also received an ESRI “Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) Award” in March of 2024. This award is given to user sites around the world to recognize outstanding work with GIS technology.
Key changes in website function included mobile responsiveness for better functionality.
Best Practices and Lessons Learned
Best Practices and Lessons Learned include:
- Ensuring ample time for application or webpage design, testing, and troubleshooting before publicly deploying.
- Build and maintain relationships across executive offices and agencies for potential collaboration on ResilientMass tools and pages.
- Gather end-user feedback through various methods including surveys, conversation, and focus groups. Ensure that future improvements address overarching concerns of end users.
Project Alignment with ResilientMass Plan Priority Actions
The project directly supports the following actions from the 2023 SHMCAP mandated to the EOEEA:
- Address the risk of extreme heat to building occupant.
- Incorporate hazard and climate change vulnerability into capital planning, master planning, and facilities management functions.
- Develop a framework for statewide resilience progress tracking.
- Incorporate hazard and climate change vulnerability into capital planning, master planning, and facilities management functions
- Increase access to state resilience funding.
- Increase funding to support municipal and agency resilience actions and access to funding opportunities.
- Increase funding, eligibility, and focus on environmental justice to and within municipal and agency resilience actions.
- Launch a statewide Climate Communications Campaign.
- Launch an Office of Climate Science.
Further Action
EEA’s Climate Team is continuing to work with their vendor on implementing the FY25 scope. Scope items include enhancements to the back-end content management tools for better streamlining the technologies and continuing to give Climate Team more autonomy over making changes to pages in the future. The Resource Clearinghouse is in the final stages of development and slated for deployment in early FY25. Archived pages on various sectors (e.g., Economy) and climate trends (e.g., Changes in Precipitation), old 2018 SHMCAP pages (e.g., SHMCAP Portal home), outdated map viewer and datagrapher are slated to be permanently removed. Archived pages have either already been replaced (e.g., 2023 ResilientMass Plan) or are slated in FY25. Improvements to the GEAR tool are also slated for FY25.
A website menu re-organization and build out is also planned for FY25. This will include the addition of new resources and pages including available grant opportunities for resilience across the state, funding and grant writing resources, and the highlighting of available climate resilience tools and data from other agencies and organization across the Commonwealth on the ResilientMass website.
Additional Information and Resources
Project Website: MA Climate Change Clearinghouse (mass.gov)