Skip to content

Climate Ready Boston Wins National APA Resilience Award

Sasaki is delighted to announce the American Planning Association (APA) awarded the Climate Ready Boston Citywide Report a 2019 National Planning Achievement Award for Resilience – Gold Winner, the highest honor within the category. The resilience award recognizes efforts that better equip a community to recover from and adapt to shocks and stresses like natural disasters, human-caused disasters, and climate change so that communities become better prepared than ever before.

The Climate Ready Boston Report, a planning initiative, which Sasaki completed as part of the Arcadis, UMass Boston, and HR+A team for the City of Boston in late 2016, sets forth a comprehensive strategy to guide the city towards a more resilient future. Since the plan’s completion, Climate Ready Boston has elevated resilience to a citywide priority, with 24 of its 39 details (62%) already underway or complete.

Examples of the resilience initiatives advanced by the plan include a campaign to expand citywide climate readiness, education, and engagement; prioritizing minority-and-women-owned businesses for resilience projects; and developing local climate resilience plans in vulnerable areas to support district-scale climate adaptation.

Working with the broader team, Sasaki led the social vulnerability analysis; created maps, charts, and graphs to visually communicate climate science and hazard risks; and illustrated resilience opportunities.

For more details on all the campaigns included as part of Climate Ready Boston, read the City of Boston’s full report. Photo courtesy of APA, photo by The Photo Group.

About Climate Ready Boston

The Climate Ready Boston Report shows how climate resilience planning can create lasting impacts for a more prepared, healthy, and safe city, while also contributing to livability, equity, and opportunity for all residents. It demonstrates how climate resilience can go beyond hazard mitigation and contribute to a better city.

The plan addresses multiple scales and layers of resilience by developing strategies focused on:

  • Preparing and connecting communities
  • Protecting shores
  • Implementing resilient infrastructure
  • Building adaptable buildings

The APA recognizes the Climate Ready Boston Report, in part, because of its innovative resilience approaches:

Equity & Social Resilience Focus: The plan focuses on leveraging future resilience investments to create a more livable, safe, and healthy city with opportunities for all residents, especially lower income residents and people of color.

Accessible Visual Communication: Communicating climate science and hazard risks through accessible graphs, maps, and other visualizations.

Online Progress Tool: An online dashboard displays progress on each initiative, making implementation more transparent.

Open-source Climate Resilience Spatial Data: This platform shares the plan’s flooding, heat, and social vulnerability data.

“It is an honor to have Climate Ready Boston recognized by the APA. We are thankful to have worked with the City of Boston—and with our broader team, including Arcadis, HR&A, and UMass Boston—to help contribute to a more resilient future,” says Jill Dixon, AICP, Sasaki Senior Associate who was a senior planner on the project. “It’s more important than ever that we work together with partners in private and public sectors to find opportunities to leverage resilience investments to improve our city for everyone.”

Sasaki colorful logo Sasaki 中文