About the Climate Ready Estuaries Program

The Climate Ready Estuaries program works to help the National Estuary Programs and all environmental mangers to address climate change in watersheds and coastal areas. This effort, initiated in 2008, brings together EPA's oceans and coastal protection programs, and Climate Change Programs, to build additional capacity in the NEPs and coastal communities as they prepare to adapt to the effects of climate change. The EPA Office of Research and Development and Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water support this effort as well.

Climate Ready Estuaries assists NEPs and coastal communities in becoming "climate ready" by providing tools and assistance to assess climate change vulnerability and plan for adaptation.

As part of the Climate Ready Estuaries program, EPA will coordinate and communicate with other federal agencies and external partners that work on coastal adaptation efforts to:

• share information,
• identify opportunities for collaboration, and
• minimize duplication of effort.

Learn More about CRE

Mission and Methodology

• EPA press release announcing the Climate Ready Estuaries program, June 19, 2008
• "Creating Climate Ready Estuaries" in an archive of NOAA's Coastal Services magazine, May/June 2009 edition
• "Priming Coastal Managers to Think about Rolling Easements as an Option for Sea Level Rise" in an archive of NOAA's Coastal Services magazine, September/October 2011 edition
• "Interview with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Climate Ready Estuaries Program" in an archive of The Coastal Society Bulletin (2011)

Results

• List of National Estuary Program climate change projects, 2008–2018
• Climate Ready Estuaries Ten Year Progress Report, 2008–2018 (pdf)
• Climate Ready Estuaries annual progress reports: 2009 (pdf) , 2010 (pdf) , 2011 (pdf) , 2012 (pdf)
• Lessons Learned from the Climate Ready Estuaries Program (3 reports)

Recordings and Videos

Materials at archive.org from Climate Ready Estuaries presentations with EPA's Watershed Academy

• "Working Together to Address the Effects of Climate Change on Water Resources" October 2009
• "Climate Change Adaptation Tools for Addressing Water Issues" December 2010

Climate Ready Estuaries recorded webcasts with EPA's Watershed Academy

• "Climate Resilience: What to Expect, How to Prepare, and What You Can Learn from Others" October 2014
• "Climate Change Adaptation" June 2021

Videos at youtube.com

• Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment for San Juan Bay, Puerto Rico
• Preparing for Climate Change in Eastern Long Island, New York

CRE Publications

Syntheses, monographs, methodologies and tools can be found on the Coastal Adaptation Toolkit and Risk-Based Adaptation pages.

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