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After The Storm Is Too Late: Climate Resilience as a Governance Challenge

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 22:26:03 GMT

From: Tai Collaborative

This blog draws on the Community Climate Resilience Workshop convened by the Climate Democracy Initiative with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Hosted at the Pocantico Center in Tarrytown, New York. From 14 to 16 July 2026, the Community Climate Resilience Workshop brought together more than 20 emergency managers, extension educators, disaster survivors, recovery directors, and community organizers to center the voices and experiences of small-town leaders from across the United States, ensuring that those closest to the impacts help shape the solutions.

The capacity to build before the emergency

This is why support, both civic and financial, matters most during the "steady state" years, when no disaster is imminent. It was also where the CCR Workshop's testimony grew most specific. As one survey respondent put it, "Preparing communities to accept the fact-based urgency that extreme events will continue to occur and escalate requires a holistic understanding of the myriad paths to plan and prepare."

Across the surveys and discussions, the same three gaps surfaced again and again, the ones small and rural communities hit when they try to prepare in advance:

Access, training, and education. "Generally, assets and resources are not provided to implement plans, most of which are 'surface' interventions that do not investigate or consider the cause or context of the disaster," wrote one participant. People need to understand how emergency systems work, how to train and practice plans, and what actions to take well before sirens sound. That knowledge cannot be reserved for professionals. Local leaders, educators, faith communities, youth, and trusted messengers all need accessible tools and a shared language. The tools largely exist already. They are simply out of reach for the people who need them most.

Communication, awareness, and information sharing. "The need for effective communication, regarding both proactive outreach and timely, clear, and consistent emergency messaging, is critical," wrote a participant. "A more informed public will demand changes at the institutional level." Beyond immediate public safety, effective communications are essential for interagency coordination, continuous information sharing, and real-time analysis. Communities need channels that are accessible, consistent, locally trusted, and two-way, so residents can send conditions and local knowledge back to decision-makers rather than only receive alerts. When people know the process beforehand and see their needs reflected in it, trust takes hold before misinformation fills the vacuum.

Recovery, resources, and distribution. A central question for the workshop was "How do we empower small and rural communities to access resources or connect with each other to navigate the resources that are available?" Awareness of what support exists does not mean a community can actually reach it. Recovery funding rarely reaches communities equitably; often those hit hardest, including renters, small businesses, older adults, people with disabilities, and under-resourced neighborhoods, have the most difficulty navigating funding streams. CCR participants described how this plays out in their own towns, again and again. A democratic approach is not prescriptive; it’s inclusive. Community voices and values inform the process for a stronger recovery rather than a rebuild of yesterday's vulnerabilities.

What this means for funders

For funders, the shift required is one of timing, not priorities. Climate disruption is placing fresh demands on the very things governance funders already care about: public trust, accountable institutions, equitable design, local leadership, and effective public investment. The catch is timing. Disaster money tends to arrive after the harm, yet what decides how a community fares is the relational, community-led groundwork laid well before. That groundwork is precisely what public systems struggle to fund, and precisely what philanthropy is uniquely positioned to support.

The practitioners at the workshop were consistent about what helps. For funders looking to serve small and rural communities, three commitments stand out.

Fund the assessment, not the ask. The most effective models begin with a publicly funded vulnerability and capacity assessment, not a request that communities endorse a plan they had no hand in shaping.
Invest in trusted local conveners. "If you've met one community, you've met one community," as one convener said. Because each place is distinct, a local organization understands better than any outside funder how to put money to work effectively, and it carries accurate information when official channels are overwhelmed.
Back train-the-trainer models. Participants agreed that the more small and rural communities connect with one another, the faster hard-won lessons get shared and applied.

What ties the three together is a single conviction. The notion that small and rural places know themselves best is a reality often overlooked by national, regional and even state models for preparing, responding and recovering. When funders act on it, putting knowledge and money in the same room, these communities gain what they most often lack: the room to act for themselves.

This is why the "before" matters so much to the “after.” Communities that enter a crisis with civic capacity already in place, trusted messengers, local leadership, working relationships across institutions, and a shared sense of local priorities are not simply calmer in the moment. They are better positioned to steer recovery toward repair rather than repetition, and to hold the process accountable when it starts to leave people out.

None of this means every emergency decision belongs in a public meeting. In an acute crisis, speed and expertise do matter. But infusing participatory governance into readiness can address these gaps and create a more relevant process written “by the people, for the people.” The result is hopefully living documents that don’t sit on shelves gathering dust, but become evolving discussions and plans people actually use.

Ask any disaster survivor when the real decisions get made, and many will tell you it is not before the storm. It is in the chaotic, disorienting aftermath when a narrow window opens for a community to rebuild and then closes as people want their children back in school, their neighbors back home, and a sense of normalcy to return. Efficient use of that window is rarely determined by the crisis itself. It is decided long before by who has the relationships, the information, and the standing to coordinate when it really counts.

To understand this reality better, the Climate Democracy Initiative hosted its first Community Climate Resilience (CCR) Workshop from July 14-16, 2026, at the Pocantico Center in New York. The event was supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and designed in partnership with a coalition of experts in small-town and rural climate resilience, community organizing, and emergency management. Structured as a working session, the convening put the people closest to the impacts in charge of the agenda to define what a replicable, community-led resilience model would actually require in the field. The recovery leaders who informed the workshop and convened on-site came from some of the country's toughest recent disasters. Among them are Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina, the Eaton Fire, which spread into Altadena, California, F5 tornadoes in Oklahoma, flooding in Texas, and oil spills along the Gulf Coast. Their shared conclusion was an uncomfortable one. The systems built to manage emergencies, essential as they are, cannot by themselves produce community resilience, especially in small and rural communities.

Emergency management and hazard mitigation give communities something valuable: roles, protocols, funding streams, and a shared language. But they are largely built as "one size fits all" structures, geared toward identifiable hazards and declarable disasters. Climate change does not cooperate with that design. Alongside acute shocks, communities now face slower, compounding stresses such as extreme heat, drought, wildfire smoke, water scarcity, failing infrastructure, rising insurance costs, and strained local economies. These pressures do not always announce themselves as emergencies, yet steadily erode a community's capacity to cope. Fewer and fewer places move through a clean disaster cycle of before, during, and after. Many live in all three phases at once.

The difference in those moments of overlapping crises comes down to the community itself. As one CCR Workshop participant put it, weaving local values into planning helps “bring some organization to a messy situation—clear communication, roles, and priorities—so the community can focus on rebuilding, not fighting confusion.” The work, they added, is "about helping people in pain and helping the whole system get organized enough to move forward."

Historically, local capacity is one of the hardest things to fund and the easiest to defer. As severe storms and cumulative climate impacts continue, this is no longer tenable. The next generation of crisis readiness must prioritize localized democratic principles as a central part of resilience. Without civic capacity anchored in local knowledge and values, even well-designed programs miss the people who need them most.

Recovery is a governance question

It is tempting to treat recovery solely as a logistical enterprise focused on repairing infrastructure, reopening services, and moving aid out the door. In truth, recovery is where a community's future is rewritten. It determines not just what gets rebuilt, but who returns, who is priced out, and which hazards are mitigated for the next storm.

A culvert sized to yesterday's rainfall, a neighborhood rebuilt in the floodplain, and a family that never makes it back are considerations of trust, accountability, and inclusion — the substance of governance, surfacing at the moment it matters most. When decisions are made in conditions streamlined for expediency instead of inclusion, what happens in practice misses the mark. As one participant explained, “Effective recovery is equitable, meaning that the most vulnerable and least resourced communities are prioritized and resourced with recovery plans that will improve their resiliency in the future and align with their economic, health, and environmental sustainability goals.”

Natalie Montecino is Executive Director of the Climate Democracy Initiative , where she works at the intersection of environmental action and participatory democracy to elevate community voice and build more inclusive systems of local leadership.

Kara Lamb is Community Visioning Program Manager at the Climate Democracy Initiative , where she leads strategic engagement that helps communities shape equitable, resilient, and locally grounded climate futures that empower people and inform decision-making.

The Climate Democracy Initiative works at the intersection of climate and democracy, on the conviction that climate change is not only an environmental crisis but a governance one. Lasting solutions, we believe, depend on public trust, local leadership, and systems that include the people most affected. CDI helps communities reclaim decision-making power and build the civic muscle that long-term resilience requires.

Facilitating Climate Democracy in Rural Communities: An Interview with Natalie Montecino

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:37:43 GMT

From: The National Sustainability Society

BY: CRISTY WATKINS

Natalie Montecino is the Executive Director of the Climate Democracy Initiative (CDI), a role she stepped into last January after first joining the organization in 2023 as Programs Director. She leads a team of eight staff and Senior Fellows, directing organizational strategy, guiding fundraising, and building relationships from the local to international level. Evenings and weekends, she teaches two courses for Stanford University’s SPICE Program for students based in Japan on sustainable development, U.S.-Japan relations and social entrepreneurship.

She and her CDI colleagues will join us at the 3rd Annual NSS Conference next week, presenting their work on Wednesday August 19th (Session 9C): in Catalyzing a Rural Climate Renaissance: Local Voice, Trusted Partners, and Collective Action

Community Engagement: Timing, Capacity, Fatigue

Cristy : In your NSS session, you begin with the premise that community engagement in rural areas often happens too late or feels extractive. From your perspective, why is this? What are some of the reasons traditional engagement models short-change or even fail rural communities?

Natalie: Before I share some of my thoughts on this question, I want to be clear that our work at CDI has a rural focus, but the problems I'm describing aren't unique to rural places. We see the same patterns in environmental justice communities and in underinvested urban neighborhoods, and honestly, a small urban neighborhood has more in common with a rural town on this than most people assume. I think there's real opportunity for partnership there.

Timing

Natalie: But back to your question, Cristy, the first reason is timing. In development or infrastructure siting, there's almost always a proposal already on the table by the time anyone talks to the community. Someone from outside has an idea and brings it in, which we see consistently on the infrastructure side of our work. A developer wants to build a solar farm, so they start knocking on landowners' doors. For an individual landowner sitting on plots that are no longer arable, that can be an exciting deal. What this doesn't do is translate into any benefits for the rest of the town, or the county.

When there is already a predetermined proposal and terms in place, there isn’t a lot of room for meaningful engagement to occur.

I do want to acknowledge that developers need certainty. Infrastructure is one of the riskiest investments there is, and no developer can realistically wait two years while a community organizes itself and comes back with its own terms. So whatever engagement we do has to work on both sides of that. For us, timing means starting the conversation long before the proposal shows up, or before climate impacts get worse. When a community already has a locally defined platform to work through these questions, people know what they want by the time a developer arrives, and they can say so on a timeline that actually works for everyone.

Capacity

Natalie: The second reason is the capacity we assume a community already has. I live in a town with a major university and close to 170,000 full-time residents. That means we have the luxury of dedicated planners, resilience staff, climate specialists, and experts of just about every kind. I cannot make that same assumption about a town of 3,000 people. That town may not have a full-time planner on staff, or legal counsel who can sit down with a contract and negotiate terms with a developer on behalf of the community.

What often happens as a result is engagement specialists from outside of the community arrive with the best intentions, expecting to find a counterpart on the other side. They are looking for someone in the community with a clear role, the right expertise, and some prior experience with this exact kind of decision. That kind of person doesn’t always exist in every community, and that’s especially true in places that are already stretched thin. So a lot of the work turns out to be building trust between residents and the outside experts, and then making sure those experts can accurately represent what the community actually wants. That takes time, and it takes honesty about who you’re there to actually benefit.

Engagement Fatigue

Natalie: The third thing our fieldwork keeps turning up is engagement fatigue, and rural communities feel it acutely. There are plenty of universities and nonprofits like ours who show up saying we want to engage you, we want to help. When three different organizations do that in a single year, each one starting the process over from the beginning, each one drawing on the same ten residents who are willing to give up an evening, people get worn out.

If a community is repeatedly asked to show up and give their input, but it doesn't actually translate to different outcomes, what then is the incentive to continue showing up?

Fatigue tends to get read as apathy. Nobody comes to the public meeting, nobody files a comment, so the conclusion is that nobody cares. I read it differently. Those folks have already given their time to this once or twice or three times over, and they watched it go nowhere.

Community Visioning

Cristy: The Climate Democracy Initiative uses a ‘Community Visioning’ model to engage rural communities more effectively. Can you describe how this process actually works on the ground? How do you facilitate, without being top-down, the movement toward a cohesive collective platform?

Proactivity

Natalie: Proactivity sits at the center of everything we do at CDI, and Community Visioning is no exception. What it means in practice is a community talking with itself, across the diversity of its residents, well before anyone from outside shows up with a proposal. What do people want for this place? What should the next ten years look like here, or the next twenty, or the next fifty?

When a community works through that visioning process together and arrives at a desired future it can name, we can help build toward it. The vision belongs to the community. Our part is making room for the conversation and helping turn what comes out of it into goals concrete enough to act on.

It's hard to ask people to give up an evening for a hypothetical, and if all you can offer is a warning about something that might arrive someday, you shouldn't expect a crowd. But people are rarely short on ideas about what they want for their own town and their own kids. Start there, and by the time a developer knocks or a disaster hits, the community already knows what it's working toward and can measure the challenge in front of it against that vision.

The Invite-In Process

Natalie: This is true across all of our work: we operate on an invite-in basis only. We don't approach a community and tell them we think they have a problem and they should work with us to fix it. We get to know people through networks that already exist, and nearly every invitation we've received has come through word of mouth. Someone who has worked with us before says to a community somewhere else, I think you'd get a lot out of working with this team.

The 'we're here to help you' model doesn't work. People need ownership of what happens to them and to their community. When a community has agency, they define and cultivate their own change.

I'll admit this made for slow going in our early years. But once we had a track record of actually being invited to the table by communities, the pace changed. Trust that used to take two years to build now starts from a much stronger place, much faster, because people can see we are there to support them on their terms.

Facilitator, Not Advocate

Natalie: Our role is to hold the space for an engagement process to happen. We bring in outside experts when a community needs them, and we help distill a platform from which future decisions can be made. We don't come in with an agenda.

So if a community invites us in because a solar developer has approached them, our goal is not to get that community to say yes or no. I know that surprises people. But our goal is to support a community in defining for themselves what they want for their own future. We then facilitate for them access to resources, planning processes, and trainings they might want or need to make the desired future a reality.

If we are going to be good stewards of democracy, we need to let the process of engagement unfold naturally and not try to tip the scale in any one direction

I do believe clean energy offers real economic and environmental benefits, and I want to see more communities take advantage of them. It just can't happen on my timeline, or on the climate movement's timeline alone. If it's going to have any staying power, the space has to exist for communities to decide for themselves.

Bumps in the Road

Cristy: As you have implemented this model, have you run into any bumps in the road, surprises, or barriers that made you rethink or adjust the approach?

CDI’s Name

Natalie: Here's the truth: as we're often reminded, 'if you've met one community...you've met one community.' Each community is different. They have their own cultures, processes, ways of life, and identities. It's incumbent upon us, once invited in, to meet them where they're at and learn these things, come to know them on their own terms.

Also, we've been asked more than once if having the words "climate" and "democracy" in our name is a problem. What CDI is focused on is the increasing threat communities nationwide see from severe storms, continuing drought, and year-long fire seasons and the ability to define, for themselves, how to address those challenges.

Not shying away from our core values...we very rarely find anybody who doesn’t believe in the value of democracy and doesn’t want that for their community, for their children.

What's worked when our name is questioned is not shying away from our core values, and not giving up on the belief that everybody holds something they care about in the natural world. Everyone has a stake in the resources around them, and climate change threatens those resources. The same goes for democracy. When we sit down and get to what democracy actually is, what it means, who it's for, we very rarely find someone who doesn't believe in it or doesn't want it for their community and their kids.

Where we have gotten creative is in the language. We don't always lead with climate and democracy. We're not there to make a moral argument. What we want is for communities to be prepared for the reality they're living in now and the one that's likely coming, in terms of both threats to their local environment and the development headed their way. When the conversation is genuinely about resilience at the community level, everybody gets behind it.

Partnerships and Sustained Action

Youth Involvement

Cristy: Y outh can be incredibly energetic and passionate, and they can also be busy, have multiple competing interests, and plans that take them to other endeavors. How has CDI's approach leveraged youth involvement such that communities build their own independent local capacity?

Natalie: You've named the hard part, and in rural communities it often lands even harder. Ask a small town what it has lost over the past twenty years and young people are usually top of the list. Students graduate and leave, for school or work or just to see what else is out there, and we want that for them. So the question we're always working on is what stays behind after students go on to their next adventure.

Here's what we've found. Young people are already raising climate and civic ideas in their schools and towns, and often the adults around them want to respond but don't quite know how. So that's the work. We help educators, organizations, and local agencies become genuine partners to young people, which means knowing how to take a student's idea seriously and having somebody to call when it needs more than one institution to happen. Those calls get made because a student has an amazing idea. The collaboration that emerges, though, continues to grow long after that student graduates.

That concept of relational capacity building through youth empowerment is what ECLIPSE is built around, and it's why we start by listening. Where are young people already leading on their own? What is the community trying to address at the local level? What relationships would make those two things meet? More often than not the opportunities are already there and simply haven't been connected. That's true anywhere, though larger cities tend to have more established networks. Rural communities have the same passionate young people and far fewer pathways linking them to broader civic and environmental work.

Adults love to call youth ‘the leaders of tomorrow.’ What we see is them leading today.

We’ve worked with students who took on indoor air quality in their own schools, who advocated for the protection of public lands, who helped rehabilitate wildfire burn scars, and who designed and taught their own civic lessons so that other people could understand how to participate in the democratic process. None of those ideas were waiting on us. What we could do was make sure the adults around them were ready to support their leadership, and that every one of those projects left a community better connected than it was.

Leadership in Southern Colorado

Natalie: One of my favorite examples of a recent success with our ECLIPSE program comes from the ripple effect we're seeing across Southern Colorado. Last year, we worked with more than 300 educators, both in and out of school, along with over 35 community organizations and local coalitions, to help identify authentic pathways for youth voice and leadership to emerge within their own communities. Every community looked a little different, but the goal was the same: create meaningful opportunities for youth to be partners in local priorities, not just observers.

Those conversations led to some incredible outcomes. In one community, we partnered to remove barriers like transportation and financing so that, for the first time, 30 middle school students and their educators from Southern Colorado could attend a statewide convening on youth environmental leadership. We also partnered to create a dedicated youth track at a traditionally adult-centered environmental summit, ensuring young people have a meaningful space in the room alongside community leaders.

What has been most inspiring isn't the events themselves. It's what happened afterward. Students came home saying, "We could do that here." Educators left with new partners, resources, and organizations they could connect with to support student ideas. Those students are now leading recycling and composting initiatives, designing environmental action projects, partnering with nationally recognized organizations, and stepping into youth advisory roles for the first time.

What has been most inspiring isn't the events themselves. It's what happened afterward. Students came home saying, "We could do that here."

Rather than replicating someone else's model, we're helping communities create pathways and actions that reflect their own culture, strengths, priorities, and voices, while surrounding youth with an ecosystem of adults and organizations ready to help remove barriers and support their ideas.

To me, that's what building local capacity really looks like. It's students realizing they belong in these spaces, educators knowing where to turn or what to lean into when students have an idea, and communities creating lasting pathways that allow youth leadership to continue growing long into the future.

Rural Climate Renaissance

Cristy : I love your title, Rural Climate Renaissance. Renaissance implies a revival or a restoration of something. What does climate renaissance mean in the context of Colorado communities, the ones that you work with, and what are they returning to?

Natalie: Actually, the title of our panel was inspired by the Rural Renaissance Project, which CDI has been a member of for two years. It's run statewide by the University of Denver, as part of the Colorado Project at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies. That's also where we've come to work closely with one of our panelists, Aaron Miltenberger, who directs the Boys and Girls Club of the San Luis Valley.

I think renaissance centers around the values of stewardship that rural America has exemplified for a very long time.

The climate renaissance piece isn't about returning to a particular way of doing things. Plenty of those older ways aren't viable in a future shaped by climate change, and we know that. For me, renaissance centers on the values of stewardship that rural America has exemplified for a very long time. Stewards of natural resources, stewards of agriculture, stewards of local economies. The question in this new renaissance is how we amplify the leadership rural communities are already holding, and do it in a way that lasts.

To that end, resilience is on our minds constantly. How do you hold onto a tradition of stewardship in a world that climate change is actively rearranging? How do we get to the future we want by a more resilient path?

The Future

Cristy: What's next? Does the Climate Democracy Initiative have goals for expansion?

Natalie: While we're headquartered in Colorado, and many of our forays into the climate democracy space have started here, our call is to the national stage. In fact, we already have programming branching out across the country and abroad.

As a young and scrappy organization, our growth has been opportunistic. We go where we're invited. This next chapter is about being more intentional, building partnerships in the geographies where the starkest climate impacts are colliding with rural communities that have never been proactively engaged to prepare for them.

Part of our national scaling includes our recently launched Community Climate Resilience program, which is focused on extreme weather and emergency management. This summer we hosted our first national convening at the Pocantico Center in Tarrytown, New York. We brought together representatives from more than 25 organizations around the country, many of them people who had just lived through and led during some of the hardest disasters we've seen recently. We had leaders from Hurricane Helene, the Eaton and Palisades fires in California, and the flooding in Texas, to name just a few.

We see an opportunity for democracy and civic engagement to be the foundation of the future of community resilience.

Natalie: The disaster space is new territory for us at CDI, but the ground is shifting underneath everyone working in it. Federal capacity is declining, programs are fragmented, and funding access is increasingly restricted. We see a real opening here for democracy and civic engagement to become the foundation of what community resilience and crisis readiness looks like.

Whether working with a community or empowering youth leadership, CDI exists so that small and rural communities can speak for themselves and be answered. We work with anyone ready to say what they want for their own future.

The NSS Annual Conference

Join hundreds of cross-sectoral sustainability professionals as they share their work that champions evidence-based research, innovative and accessible solutions, and the persistence and preparation essential to building a hopeful and resilient future.

Inspiring plenaries, symposia, roundtables, posters, workshops, professional development courses, fun leisure activities, and networking opportunities await.

The conference will be hosted by Colorado State University's School of Sustainable Futures and the CSU Climate Hub at Spur. Click here to register.

The Democratic Approach to Confronting Climate Change

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 19:21:43 GMT

From: TheHill.com

BY: WILLIAM S. BECKER

“Everybody talks about the weather,” the old quip goes , “but nobody does anything about it.” People, in other words, complain endlessly about realities beyond their control.

Today, we know that we do influence the weather and can do something about it. The decisions we each make every day, particularly how we use energy, influence whether the weather becomes more extreme.

Natural disasters, from floods and wildfires to tornadoes and deadly heat waves, dominate the evening news. Big disasters — those with damages of at least $1 billion — have increased 83 percent worldwide since the 1990s. Last year, there were 23, the third highest number since 1980. They caused 276 deaths and $115 billion in damages .

Scientists agree there is no place to hide: Every part of the country is affected.

As recently as four years ago, people were less inclined to believe that personal action could influence climate change. This year, nearly 60 percent of us feel a personal obligation to do something about it. There is growing interest in something called “climate democracy,” in which communities engage citizens in preventing, preparing for and recovering from weather-related disasters. Everybody with an environmental footprint — in other words, everybody — has a vote.

Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate calls for a 1-year moratorium on construction of new data centers

One leader is the Climate Democracy Initiative , a Colorado-based nonprofit where I am an unpaid senior fellow. It argues that climate change is a governance problem as well as an environmental crisis, especially in small and rural communities with limited resources. They must deal with extreme weather while contending with uncertain federal help and fragmented government programs.

“Our goal is flipping that script to put local voices first,” the initiative’s executive director, Natalie Montecino, explains. “People are contending with rapid environmental, economic, and political changes without the resources, representation, or institutional trust needed to respond. We work with communities to build the civic leadership and decision-making power to shape that response themselves, rather than wait on systems that too often leave them behind.”

In other words, environmental stewardship and climate action become exercises in local democracy. Local action is necessary because while federal help is essential, it is not always reliable. Climate change is a forever crisis, but elected leaders and their priorities keep changing.

The current administration in Washington denies that climate change is even real. Since the U.S. agreed in 1992 to work with other countries on climate action, Congress has done little to nothing.

People are the ultimate victims of extreme weather; they are also the ultimate solution, using local building codes, land-use planning, zoning, managed retreats, clean energy technologies, and nature-based hazard mitigation measures.

This doesn’t absolve the federal government from responsibility. It has encouraged climate change by subsidizing fossil energy production and pollution for more than a century.

Among other things, it should shift fossil energy subsidies to disaster mitigation. Direct federal subsidies total about $35 billion each year, but the real cost to the American people is $725 billion annually when the social and environmental damages of fossil fuels are counted. It’s an extraordinary example of corporate welfare for a wealthy and mature industry.

It should also deal with legacy risks. In the last century, the government’s approach to disasters was to control nature with engineering works. Now, tens of millions of Americans live in natural floodplains and within reach of storm surges, assuming that structures keep them safe. There are nearly 17,000 high-hazard dams and at least 24,000 miles of levees in the U.S. Most were built to be reliable for 50 years, but their average age is over 60. Few, if any, were built to handle the intensity of today’s weather. It would cost over $165 billion to repair deficient dams, $70 billion to repair levees, and $416 billion by 2040 to armor coasts against sea-level rise. It would be safer and more cost-effective to fund nonstructural, nature-based mitigation.

The federal government should emphasize disaster avoidance. In 2024 and 2025, more Americans moved out of disaster zones than moved into them. FEMA should prioritize “managed retreats” that allow communities to retain residents and property tax revenues. Federal buyouts of at-risk homes return up to $6 for every $1 spent , compared with $2 from levees or flood-proofing. However, it takes FEMA at least five years on average to finalize buyouts, which is unworkable for many homeowners.

It should also improve access to assistance. More than 30 federal agencies offer programs that could help communities deal with disasters, but there is no single point of access. FEMA should create one, along with a single application portal for federal aid. FEMA should approve local response and recovery plans before disasters to expedite its post-disaster help.

However, local people must take control of their future and own it by minimizing fossil-energy pollution, restoring beneficial ecosystems, moving out of identified disaster zones, and planning well in advance for the next bad weather event.

William S. Becker is a former U.S. Department of Energy central regional director who administered energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies programs. He also served as special assistant to the department’s assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy. Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

Climate Resilience is Local Governance!

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:00:52 GMT

Climate Resilience is Local Governance!

For Immediate Release: July 27, 2026

Pocantico Hills, NY — Talk to anyone who has lived through a disaster, and they will tell you that key decisions rarely happen during the storm. They happen in the fog of the days and weeks after when stress is high, people are lost, and funding is hardest to secure. As severe storms and cumulative climate impacts increase, reactive approaches are no longer tenable. The next generation of crisis readiness must prioritize localized democratic principles as a central part of resilience.

To address this challenge, the Climate Democracy Initiative (CDI) officially launched its Community Climate Resilience (CCR) program with its first national convening, supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund at their Pocantico Center in New York. The goal is to center the voices and experiences of small town and rural leaders from across the country in proactive, inclusive planning for disaster recovery, hazard mitigation, and community resilience.

Because CCR’s focus is inclusion of small town and rural voices in the planning process, CDI developed the workshop with representatives from more than 25 rural and small-town organizations on the front lines of recent disaster recovery efforts. Among them were leaders from communities impacted by Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, the Eaton Fire in California, and historic flooding in Texas.

“Our participants shared that the systems built to manage emergencies cannot by themselves produce resilience, especially in small and rural communities," said CDI Executive Director Natalie Montecino. In the coming weeks and months, participants will continue their collaboration, reaching out to others in similar situations to redefine best practices and identify resourcing opportunities. “Our goal is to provide a jumping-on point for any community finding themselves left out of currently available trainings, communications, and resources,” Montecino said. “And we want their input! Those closest to the impacts must be central to shaping the solutions.”

To learn more, explore upcoming programming, or get involved, visit the CDI Community Climate Resilience Program , or contact CCR Program Manager Kara Lamb at kara@climatedemocracyinitiative.org or (970) 215-9545 .

CDI at the 2026 Skoll World Forum: Reflections from Oxford

Fri, 22 May 2026 21:10:42 GMT

By Natalie Montecino, Executive Director

This spring, I had the privilege of representing the Climate Democracy Initiative at the 2026 Skoll World Forum in Oxford, UK. For CDI, our first year at Skoll was both a milestone and an invitation: a chance to share what we are learning from communities at home, while listening to others who are asking similar questions around the world.

A theme that emerged for me during the Forum was that the world is fractured, but repair is possible, and that idea stayed with me throughout the week.

What made Skoll feel different from other gatherings was not only the scale of the issues being discussed, but the spirit in which people approached them. The Forum felt generous and relationship-centered, filled with people who brought urgency to their work without losing humility about how much there is still to learn.

Beyond the main Forum, I joined conversations through Sidebar and the Marmalade Festival with organizations focused on democracy, land use, and youth leadership, including DemocracyNext , Porticus , The Aspen Institute , Global Fund for Children , and The Iris Project . Across these conversations, one question kept surfacing in different forms: how do communities make good decisions when conditions are changing faster than the systems built to support them?

That question sits at the heart of CDI. In Colorado and beyond, communities are facing decisions about land, water, energy, infrastructure, education, recovery, and resilience. These issues are often approached as technical problems or political debates, but in the lives of communities they are also questions of trust, belonging, voice, and power: who has access to information, who is invited in early enough to shape the outcome, and whose priorities become part of the future.

One of the most inspiring parts of the Forum was learning from organizations that have grown from promising models into broader platforms for change. Conversations about opportunities like the TED Audacious Project and the Skoll Award for Social Innovation helped me better understand what larger-scale funding and recognition can make possible, and what it asks of an organization in return. The lesson I carried home was not simply that CDI should pursue bigger opportunities, but that we need to keep clarifying the change we are trying to make.

Community visioning, youth leadership, public learning, crisis readiness, and institutional partnership are different expressions of the same belief: communities need the civic strength to shape climate-era decisions before those decisions shape them. CDI remains rooted in the communities where we work, and that grounding is our strength. But our time at Skoll reminded me that local work can carry meaning far beyond its first place of practice when it helps answer questions many communities are facing at once.

We left Oxford with new relationships, sharper questions, and a renewed sense of responsibility. The climate era will ask more of communities than plans alone can provide. It will ask for trust, leadership, imagination, and the capacity to decide together what comes next.

That is the work CDI is growing toward.

To learn more about CDI’s work or explore partnership opportunities, contact u s here.

Reflecting on 2025: CDI's Annual Impact Report

Fri, 08 May 2026 18:27:52 GMT

View 2025 Impact Report Here

At the Climate Democracy Initiative, 2025 was a year of building foundations—not just programs, but the trust, relationships, and local leadership capacity that make lasting climate progress possible.

Our 2025 Annual Impact Report captures the work of a growing team committed to one core belief: that addressing climate change requires not only technical solutions, but governance systems capable of navigating complexity, disagreement, and change.

This year, CDI directly engaged over 900 youth, educators, and community members across Colorado. Through the ECLIPSE program, more than 300 students and 40 educators from 15 communities attended statewide leadership summits, with many returning home to launch youth-led projects focused on sustainable food access, recycling systems, and habitat resilience. Over 300 educators reported increased confidence in supporting student-led climate action.

We also launched Community Visioning in Colorado—a proactive planning program designed to help rural and semi-rural communities shape their futures before major development proposals arrive. Early engagement reached seven Colorado counties, with four communities inviting CDI into deeper conversations about planning priorities and long-term resilience.

Beyond Colorado, CDI represented its mission at the World Economic Forum in Davos and the Aspen Ideas Festival, submitted official EPA regulatory comments, and partnered with Harvard Law School to explore the future of democratic resilience.

Looking ahead to 2026, CDI will deepen its work in the Fraser River valley and San Luis Valley, expand the Community Visioning model toward eastern Utah and southern Wyoming, and move ECLIPSE toward full institutionalization through school district partnerships, CTE pathway bootcamps, and statewide youth advocacy infrastructure.

The work is steady, the partnerships are growing, and the communities leading it are real.

View the Full 2025 Impact Report →

Natalie Montecino: Cornell Center on Global Democracy

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:18:58 GMT

From: Cornell Center on Global Democracy

Natalie Montecino, Executive Director of the Climate Democracy Initiative, has been selected as a Non-Resident Fellow at the Cornell Center on Global Democracy. In this role, she joins a competitive global cohort of scholars and practitioners working to advance research, dialogue, and action around democratic resilience and governance. Her appointment reflects her leadership at the intersection of climate and democracy, where she focuses on empowering communities, strengthening civic participation, and developing equitable, locally driven solutions to complex environmental challenges.

Exploring Rural Resilience: How Tradition Shapes Community, Identity, and Innovation in Rural Japan

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:12:16 GMT

From: Fulbright Japan

Natalie Montecino is a program manager at a Denver, Colorado based non-profit called the Climate Democracy Initiative. She earned her bachelor’s degree in International Studies with a focus on Asia and minors in International Development, Political Science, Japanese, and French at Colorado State University. During her senior year, she was awarded a prestigious Fulbright scholarship.

As a Fulbrighter, Natalie explored development, sustainability practices, and local community engagement in rural Japan. She notes that her upbringing played a significant role in her research choice. “My rural background and my heritage were always important to me. I wanted to find a way to tap into my roots and connect with the countryside, while still studying all things international,” she says.

Natalie was hosted at Okayama University in southern Japan by Associate Professor Iwabuchi Yasushi. While in Okayama, Prof. Iwabuchi made her feel very welcome and integrated into Japanese life, eliminating many of the initial stressors and challenges of moving to a new country. “My host professor and host university were very dedicated to including me in all of their activities and helping me become a researcher for the first time,” she recalls fondly. “My advisor created an opportunity almost every single month for me to present to the community, and the turnout was always impressive,” she says.

Natalie adds that she had connected with Prof. Iwabuchi well before moving to Japan. She explains, “During my sophomore year of university, I received a Critical Language Scholarship for Japanese study, and Okayama University actually hosts this program.” While the trip to Okayama University as part of this program was canceled due to COVID-19, she participated in an online program where she had the chance to meet Prof. Iwabuchi. “I reached out to him and we started meeting online regularly one year in advance of applying for Fulbright. By the time I actually got to Japan, he and I had a very strong relationship,” says Natalie.

Despite the challenges of conducting field research in a foreign country, Natalie notes that it provided her a unique and holistic understanding of the state of rural affairs in Japan. “If there is a challenge that you're curious about, for example, rural resilience or the future of the countryside, the quickest way to better understand it is by talking to the people that are most impacted by it,” she says. “I gained the most insight by interviewing rural residents, taking the time to make connections, and seeing local experiences first-hand,” she adds.

Natalie participated in agricultural practices, notably harvesting sweet potatoes and rice, and making “mochi” (a type of Japanese rice cake) using the traditional method. These activities made her feel close to the local community and imbedded in the region’s history. Her favorite place in Okayama was Bizen city, famous for its traditional Bizenyaki pottery. She remembers taking intensive pottery lessons in Bizen city as one of her most enjoyable experiences in Okayama.

During her research, Natalie heavily focused on Yakage city due to its unique history. “The town has been working very actively for the past 20 years to bring youth back to the countryside and to create programs for international students to get involved in such as planting, harvesting, and cultural celebration events,” she explains. In her view, Yakage provides a new model for resilience that can be replicated in other places both inside and outside Japan.

In the future, Natalie aspires to address the rural-urban divide within the United States and abroad. She believes that it is possible for both city and rural people to work together, find common goals, and share values, which can help break down mental barriers against working with those from different geographic locations and help the world to become more resilient.

Offering advice to scholars who are interested in applying to Fulbright, she says, “I would recommend that they find a strong affiliate in their host country and build a relationship with them even before they're ready to apply for the program. Fulbright, or any study abroad is challenging and you shouldn't do it alone. You need to find a support network within your host country to rely on, just like you do in your home country.”

From The Salazar Center • Democracy Remade: Regeneration as Civic Practice

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:07:20 GMT

From: The Salazar Center

By: Natalie Montecino: Executive Director, CDI

An Inheritance of Disconnection
We are living in the age of broken inheritances. The systems we have received—political, economic, ecological—were not built for the world now unfolding. Every generation inherits a set of arrangements it did not choose, and ours has inherited their unraveling. Democracies fail under the weight of deep disconnection; ecosystems collapse under the strain of unrelenting extraction. What links them is not coincidence, but cause.

We have learned to separate what cannot be separated: economy from ecology, governance from the governed, human thriving from the health of the living world. These fractures, carried forward through centuries of conquest and control, have hardened into the institutions that organize daily life. We manage nature as though it was external to us and govern people as though they were interchangeable parts in an abstract machine. The result is a double erosion of the planet that sustains us and the democratic capacity that binds us together.

The same habits that degrade ecosystems—extraction, exclusion, control—also thin the social fabric of democracy. When participation narrows to a performance rather than an ongoing practice, when people lose agency over the places they inhabit, both civic and ecological commons begin to collapse. The consequence is not only environmental degradation but a quiet corrosion of meaning: a loss of shared purpose, of belonging, of the sense that collective life is something we shape rather than endure.

Too often, this dual crisis is misdiagnosed as a matter of policy or technology. But its roots lie deeper—in the relationships we have neglected, and in the systems that taught us to treat both people and places as expendable. What we face is not merely the decline of institutions, but the depletion of relationship itself. To heal one, we must learn to heal the other.

That work begins with renewal, by rediscovering reciprocity between people, place, and power. Sustainability once tried to name this effort, but the word has grown thin beneath the weight of compromise. What we need now is not preservation but restoration; not balance, but the capacity for continual revival. In a word: regeneration.

Regeneration is not the management of decline but the living practice of strengthening and rebuilding. It asks how societies can thrive by nourishing the systems, both natural and civic, that make life possible. Scholars have long recognized that such renewal cannot be imposed or easily quantified; it must emerge through collective imagination, through the reconstruction of futures that are both viable and meaningful (Robinson, 2004; Hammond, 2019).

This reorientation transforms both ideas at the heart of our crisis. Regeneration ceases to be a fixed outcome and becomes a continuous practice of reciprocity—among people, and between people and the more-than-human world. Democracy, in turn, becomes more than a mechanism for managing competing interests. It becomes the cultural capacity to negotiate the terms of our shared existence not once, but continuously, learning to adapt while remaining anchored in relationship. It is, as Hammond writes, “the only political system capable of enabling a culture of sustainability”—or what we might now more accurately define as a culture of regeneration.

A democracy capable of regeneration is not a luxury to be pursued after the planet stabilizes; it is the condition of stability itself. The question before us is no longer whether democracy can survive ecological crisis, but whether anything enduring can exist without it.

Toward a Democracy Capable of Regeneration
If regeneration depends on democracy, then we must ask what kind of democracy can sustain the culture of renewal our moment demands. The one we have inherited was designed for another age, one that valued order over adaptability, hollow representation over meaningful relationships. When communities are invited to participate in environmental decision-making—and so often they are not—they are asked to respond to questions already framed, within processes built to constrain rather than cultivate imagination. A public hearing scheduled midweek at two in the afternoon. A 300-page technical document awaiting a three-minute public comment. A survey that asks residents to rank preselected priorities. These are not practices of power-sharing; they are performances of legitimacy, carefully packaged to preserve the authority of those already in control.

A democracy capable of regeneration must begin somewhere else entirely. It must create room for public life to breathe, for deliberation to emerge before decisions harden, for meaning to be made collectively rather than managed administratively. This means engaging communities not as data points or distant stakeholders but as co-authors of the future, inviting them to articulate what they value, what sustains them, and what possibilities they are willing to build together.

When democracy begins from values rather than problems, participation takes on new depth. A restored watershed becomes more than an ecological victory—it becomes an expression of belonging, safety, continuity, and care. Environmental restoration and civic renewal are revealed not as separate projects but as parts of the same endeavor: the regeneration of relationship.

What makes this form of democracy regenerative is not its outcomes but its practice. It thrives on reflection, reciprocity, and the slow work of rebuilding trust. It is less about choosing between fixed options than about cultivating the shared capacity to adapt, to revisit assumptions, to learn, and to evolve together without losing coherence. A regenerative democracy understands that the health of a society lies not in the perfection of its institutions but in their permeability, in their ability to respond to lived experience and to make meaning in common. In such a system, citizens do more than participate; they shape the very conditions of participation itself. They become co-authors of the rules, narratives, and relationships that allow democracy to live and breathe.

Yet even this vision cannot endure without a reimagining of inclusion itself. Regeneration depends on more than opening the gates of participation—it requires changing the channels through which influence flows, so that knowledge and authority circulate freely rather than pooling in the same familiar places. Equity, in this sense, is less about access than permeability: the continual movement of power between institutions and the people they claim to serve. For young people in particular—those coming of age amid climate crisis and civic collapse—participation must carry real consequence. It must offer the authority to set priorities, direct resources, and reimagine the systems they will embody. Only then can democracy become a site of genuine belonging rather than performance.

A regenerative democracy, then, must hold both reform and reinvention at once. Existing institutions can evolve, but they cannot remain the sole custodians of public will. What is needed instead is an ecosystem of democratic practice: interconnected spaces where people deliberate, experiment, and build civic capacity together. Within this ecosystem, intermediary organizations play a vital role. They serve as translators between local knowledge and institutional process, making space for new voices to enter and for old systems to listen. Their purpose is not to supplant governance but to make it porous again—to restore the flow between people and power, between decision and the life it shapes.

In some places, that flow is beginning to return. Along the edge of a Vancouver inlet, a quiet experiment in climate democracy is revealing how inclusion and stewardship can reshape both civic life and the water itself.

Where Democracy Meets the Tide
The tide moves quietly through False Creek, a restless seam between the city’s glass and the sea’s salt. Pilings are rimmed with barnacles, herons stand in the shallows, and beneath the surface, small schools of anchovies have begun to dance again, offering a shimmering silver light show to passersby. The silent sediment looming below remembers decades of industry and neglect, a story it sputters out each time boats slow to moor. This waterbody is a place of quiet insistence, a whisper saying I’m alive.

False Creek is also a place defined by contradiction—a living estuary entangled in layers of jurisdiction and history. Once the site of Sən̓aʔqʷ, a Squamish village, it became one of Vancouver’s most polluted inlets, its tidal heart dredged and its cultural memory buried beneath concrete. Today, multiple levels of government and agencies share authority over its waters, yet few share a cohesive vision for its renewal. The result is a kind of civic stillness: an ecosystem caught between care and control, between what it was and what it might yet become.

I first met the leadership of the False Creek Friends Society in May during a “Creeky Cruise” organized for participants of the Salazar Center for North American Conservation’s Symposium for Conservation Impact in Vancouver. As we moved slowly through the inlet, they spoke of the difficulty of moving beyond advocacy and education toward collective vision. Since then, the Climate Democracy Initiative and the False Creek Friends Society have been working to imagine a different way forward. The aim is not to fix a singular problem already defined, but to create space for the community to define what renewal itself might mean. This is the heart of the False Creek Climate Democracy Initiative: a living experiment in how democratic regeneration can enable ecological regeneration.

In September, we held the first of what we hope will be many participatory workshops. It was a small but remarkable gathering of Indigenous representatives, business owners, educators, nonprofit leaders, and residents each bringing a different connection to the inlet. We did not begin with policy or plans, but with values. Participants spoke about belonging, reconciliation, and the hope of seeing salmon return and children play safely by the shore. They mapped shared assets and relationships, exploring what collective action might make those values tangible. By the end, every participant committed to stay involved—a quiet affirmation that connection, once rekindled, has the power to grow.

What is emerging in False Creek is still fragile, still forming. But it gestures toward a democracy spacious enough to hold complexity. Here, ecological regeneration and democratic regeneration are unfolding together: each strengthening the other, each teaching what it means to live responsibly in a shared place. It reminds us that renewal begins wherever people choose to act together, and that every community holds the possibility of democracy remade.

An Invitati on
The questions and ideas raised here are not only for False Creek, or for those of us already working in the space between democracy and the environment. They belong to every community that has ever wondered what it means to live well with one another and with the places that sustain us.

Wherever you are, there is a conversation waiting to begin about the futures we want to shape together. I invite you to start it. And if we can be a partner in your journey, we would be honored to walk alongside you.

Acknowledgements
My deepest thanks to the Salazar Center for inviting me to contribute to this inaugural essay series, and for making my participation in this year’s International Symposium for North American Conservation possible through their generous support. It was through that gathering—and the Salazar Center’s gift for bringing people and ideas together—that I first crossed paths with the False Creek Friends Society. From that chance meeting has grown a partnership rooted in shared care for community and place, one that continues to remind me of the quiet power of connection. I am deeply grateful to the False Creek Friends Society and to every participant in our first civic workshop for the generosity of their time, their stories, and their imagination. This work is still unfolding, and I carry immense gratitude and anticipation for all the learning, listening, and reimagining that lies ahead.

References
Giddings, B., Hopwood, B., & O’Brien, G. (2002). Environment, economy and society: Fitting them together into sustainable development. Sustainable Development, 10(4), 187–196. https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.199

Hammond, M. (2019). A cultural account of ecological democracy. Environmental Values, 28(1), 53–72. https://doi.org/10.3197/096327118X15217309300891

Newig, J., & Fritsch, O. (2009). Environmental governance: Participatory, multi‐level—and effective? Environmental Policy and Governance, 19(3), 197–214. https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.509

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CDI at the Skoll World Forum • April 21 – 24, 2026 • Oxford

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:57:31 GMT

Climate Democracy Initiative (CDI) will join global leaders, innovators, and changemakers at the Skoll World Forum—one of the world’s most influential gatherings focused on advancing social impact. Held annually in Oxford, the Forum brings together a diverse community working at the intersection of climate, governance, equity, and systems change.

For CDI, this moment comes at a critical time. Across the United States, communities are navigating rapid environmental, political, and economic shifts, often without the institutional trust or civic infrastructure needed to respond effectively. The Skoll World Forum offers a unique opportunity to engage directly with organizations and leaders who are tackling these same challenges from different angles around the world.

Why This Forum Matters

The Skoll World Forum is more than a conference—it is a space for alignment. Leaders from across sectors come together to share ideas, test strategies, and build the relationships needed to drive long-term change. As conversations around climate increasingly intersect with questions of governance, representation, and public trust, CDI is eager to contribute to and learn from this global dialogue.

Our work is grounded in a simple belief: climate solutions are only as strong as the democratic systems that support them. Without inclusive decision-making, community trust, and local leadership, even the most well-funded climate initiatives can fall short. At the Forum, we will be engaging in discussions that explore how to strengthen these systems and ensure communities have a meaningful voice in shaping their futures.

What CDI Is Bringing

As we head into the Forum, CDI is focused on sharing insights from our work supporting community-driven climate action across the country. We will be highlighting:

How local leadership can transform climate outcomes
The role of civic engagement in building long-term resilience
Strategies for rebuilding trust between institutions and communities
The importance of centering those most affected in decision-making processes

We’re particularly interested in connecting with organizations that are experimenting with new models of participatory governance, youth engagement, and cross-sector collaboration.

Looking Ahead

While the conversations at the Skoll World Forum will span a wide range of topics, one theme is clear: the challenges we face are interconnected, and so must be the solutions. Climate change is not just an environmental issue—it is deeply tied to how decisions are made, who gets to participate, and whose voices are heard.

CDI is heading into the Forum with a focus on listening, learning, and building relationships that can accelerate this work. We’re excited to bring new ideas back to the communities we serve and to continue strengthening the link between climate action and democratic participation.

Stay tuned as we share updates and reflections from Oxford in the weeks ahead.

More info on Skoll here

Statement on EPA’s Rescission of the Endangerment Finding and Repeal of Motor-Vehicle Carbon Standards

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 14:42:10 GMT

For Immediate Release: February 13th, 2026

Denver, CO — In rescinding the Endangerment Finding and repealing motor-vehicle standards for carbon pollution, EPA has chosen to disregard Supreme Court precedent, and to ignore science and logic. The agency’s sweeping rationale that it lacks authority to regulate carbon pollution is contrary to the Supreme Court's 2007 decision explicitly confirming such authority. And EPA's rationale goes far beyond motor vehicles, such that these errors overlay a profoundly anti-democratic approach: EPA is seeking not only to forgo use of the Clean Air Act to address carbon pollution during this Administration, but also to foreclose such avenues for all future Administrations. EPA thus aims to eliminate all meaningful opportunities for national limits on U.S. carbon pollution – even though the U.S. is by far the world’s largest cumulative emitter of the carbon pollution that causes climate change.

EPA additionally claims that it lacks authority to regulate carbon pollution from new motor vehicles because their emissions are too small to matter – disregarding the fact that the U.S. is currently the second-biggest emitter of carbon pollution annually and even though transportation is the U.S.’s largest source of carbon pollution. By this logic, virtually no sources anywhere in the world would warrant regulation. EPA also falsely claims that repealing the passenger-car regulations will save money. In doing so, the agency disregards abundant evidence that the regulations would have avoided some $13 billion in annual health costs, as well as $46 billion in annual fuel costs and nearly $16 billion in annual maintenance costs for drivers.

The agency’s rationales are deeply flawed, and will not stand the test of time.

For questions, please contact:

Contact: Kara Lamb, Program Manager

‍Phone: (970) 215-9545

‍Email: kara@climatedemocracyinitiative.org

Climate Democracy Initiative Selected as a 2026 Regional Resilience Fellow by Open Future Coalition

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 14:50:39 GMT

For Immediate Release: November 26th, 2025

Denver, CO — The Climate Democracy Initiative (CDI) is proud to announce its selection as a Regional Resilience Fellow in the 2026 cohort of the Open Future Coalition, joining a global network of community-led organizations advancing social, ecological, and economic resilience.
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CDI is one of 14 organizations, networks, and locally driven projects chosen from around the world. Together, these groups operate across more than 50 countries, currently serving over 150,000 community members and projected to reach more than 800,000 people within the next three years through shared learning and collaborative practice.

This Fellowship recognizes CDI’s leadership in strengthening democratic participation in climate decision-making and its commitment to supporting communities in shaping equitable and resilient futures. The Open Future Coalition highlights organizations playing a crucial role in stewarding local resilience, fostering collaboration, and advancing community-led solutions.

“This Fellowship recognizes the power of community-led climate solutions and affirms the importance of strengthening democratic participation in this moment of compounding climate challenges. We are grateful for the opportunity to learn from peers around the world who are innovating in real time, and we look forward to applying those lessons to help frontline communities and local governments build more equitable, resilient systems.” said Natalie Montecino, Executive Director of the Climate Democracy Initiative.
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As part of the Fellowship, CDI will engage in a year-long global learning cohort focused on developing and sharing practical tools that expand meaningful community participation in climate policy and planning. CDI will contribute to and benefit from a living library of community-sourced solutions that includes tools, templates, curricula, and stories designed to help communities adapt, scale, and replicate effective approaches to resilience.
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Through the Fellowship, CDI will strengthen partnerships, deepen its technical assistance offerings, and bring new insights to the local governments, grassroots groups, and community leaders it supports across the United States.
To learn more about the 2026 Regional Resilience Fellows, visit: https://www.openfuturecoalition.org/fellows

For questions, please contact:

Contact: Kara Lamb, Program Manager
‍ Phone: (970) 215-9545
‍ Email: kara@climatedemocracyinitiative.org