In 2014, Columbia Basin Trust and Selkirk College partnered to develop the State of Climate Adaptation and Resilience in the Basin (SoCARB) indicator suite, which measures community progress on climate adaptation across five climate impact pathways: extreme weather and emergency preparedness, wildfire, water supply, flooding, and agriculture. Each pathway links indicators of relevant climate changes to indicators of environmental and community impacts which are in turn linked to indicators of community response. In this way, the SoCARB approach allows for a comprehensive assessment of each community’s vulnerability and resilience to climate change.

Though the SoCARB indicator suite was designed to reflect the environmental, economic and social context of Columbia Basin communities, the pathway approach can be adapted to reflect the adaptation priorities of any community. See the section titled Adaption Measurement Resources for a description of documentation related to development of the SoCARB approach.

With the overall goal of building the capacity of Columba Basin-Boundary local governments to build the resilience of their communities to climate change, the State of Climate Adaptation Pilot Project, which ran from fall 2016 to spring 2018, had two primary objectives:

1. Better understand community-level climate vulnerabilities in our region
2. Pilot and refine the SoCARB indicator suite with the intention of developing an approach to adaptation measurement that could be readily implemented by Basin-Boundary local governments.