Sustainability and Resilience

Sustainability and Resilience

Collaborative partnerships with government and community leaders can make all the difference when planning for growth and addressing environmental issues. We help communities as they plan for and address challenges. Through data and policy analysis, we help leaders make informed decisions and develop solutions for unique community challenges. Our sustainability work focuses on environmental planning, natural resource planning, and flood and hazard resilience.

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Environmental and Natural Resource Planning

Environmental and natural resource planning uses balanced decision-making that takes the natural environment into consideration. The practice combines protection of environmental resources with community goals such as economic development, improved government efficiency and enhanced quality of life.

We excel in managing relationships, designing governance frameworks and training leaders to understand environmental issues and potential solutions for a community, state or region. Our experts are skilled at developing and facilitating customized retreats and classroom-style programs that deliver real-world environmental expertise.

We offer expertise in:

• Land use planning
• Environmental management
• Corridor planning and design

Environmental and natural resource planning occurs at both the local and regional levels, including conducting local workshops and identifying strategic uses of natural resources in eco-tourism and community development.

Flood and Hazard Resilience

Although flooding is a natural event, damage from flooding is about where and how we build; our work focuses on helping Georgia communities build resilience to such natural events to reduce damages.

Resilience is the ability of cities and other systems to handle sudden shocks and long-term stresses due to weaknesses. Weaknesses include geographic location, built environment and social and demographic factors that affect residents’ ability to respond to community stresses. Overall resilience is increased by reducing these weaknesses and then planning ahead for the challenges created by the natural environment.

Improving community resilience is a topic of discussion and research at all levels of government and academia. This topic is of interest to our partners at Georgia Sea Grant and Marine Extension. Our role is to connect those discussions and research to local governments. Through this connection, we direct research and resources toward those areas that will help communities improve their resilience.