In the summer and fall of 2018 and 2019, the entire WWA team helped to plan and facilitate VCAPS workshops in six smaller and mid-sized communities in Colorado and Utah:
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Durango, CO (Summer 2018)
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Carbondale, CO (Fall 2018)
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Cortez, CO (Fall 2018)
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Routt County, CO (Fall 2018)
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Springdale, UT (Fall 2018)
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Moab, UT (Summer 2019)
Each community-driven VCAPS workshop focused on key hazards that WWA staff identified in interviews with workshop participants. Due to the ongoing historic drought in 2018, all of the communities chose to focus on drought, and two communities also focused on extreme precipitation.
Taken together, the VCAPS workshops have given these smaller municipalities locally-relevant climate information and convened conversations that have helped them to advance their own efforts to increase resilience to severe drought. Since the workshops, we have heard from many of the communities that participated in the VCAPS Pilot Project about the value of these workshops and the impacts they had on municipal planning processes and decisions.
Next Steps
We recently conducted an online survey and interviews with workshop participants, as part of a formal evaluation process. A graduate student, Zöe McAlear, also evaluated the VCAPS Pilot Project for her MIT Master’s Thesis. We plan to publish articles that share results of this evaluation and more details about the VCAPS project soon.
WWA will apply lessons learned in the VCAPS Pilot Project to lead additional VCAPS workshops in Wyoming 2021 and 2022.