ERG - BLUE EARTH TEAM
Creating Sustainable Solutions
Our team provides a range of services, including climate adaptation and mitigation, strategic planning, organizational development, monitoring, evaluation and learning, stakeholder engagement, and decision-making framework development. We support governments, inter- and non-governmental organizations, foundations, academic institutions, businesses, and investors to improve resource management, governance, and organizational capacity.
Our mission is to build resilient and sustainable frameworks and practices in a way that is environmentally and socially resilient across all sectors and scales. We specialize in developing sustainable and resilient solutions to complex social and environmental issues that our clients confront in urban communities and natural systems.
Services
Climate and Hazard Resilience Planning
- Design and implementation of plans and processes to promote climate resilience and equity
- Climate policy and planning
- Climate and environmental justice
- Resilience plans and strategies
- Vulnerability assessments and adaptation plans
- Modeling and mapping
- Climate action plans
- Climate and hazard mitigation plans
- Monitoring and evaluation
- Decision-making frameworks
- Integrated planning and policy documents
- Stakeholder working groups
- Multisectoral collaboratives
- Community and stakeholder meeting series and events
- Communication and engagement tools
- Design of actions to reduce GHG emissions and build resilience and include just transition principles
- Energy modelling and efficiency for all sectors
- GHG measuring, reporting, and verification
- Multisector, multisource GHG mitigation strategies
- Multisector and single-sector expertise, including land use, transportation, water, and natural areas and open spaces
- Integration of climate adaptation and mitigation assessments and solutions
- Assessment of burdens and benefits, identification of actions to advance a just transition
- Multisector assessments of the quantitative and qualitative costs of inaction and benefits of actions
- Strategies to reduce risks associated with climate hazards, as well as other shocks and stressors
- Green and blue infrastructure to reduce risks and foster ecological and community benefits
- Collaboratively designed adaptation actions to increase benefits to community (including vulnerable communities), industry, and the environment
- Adaptation and implementation pathways to support decision-making, prompt effective actions, and provide a path forward to adapt over time
Engagement and Communications
- Develop strategies, engagement, and participation plans to build buy-in and foster productive relationships
- Design approaches including compensation, translation services, and childcare to provide services for meeting participants
- Build meetings on a foundation of equity and justice
- Design and manage working groups and committees
- Design and implementation of engagement exercises and small group break outs for deeper participation
- Conduct stakeholder and community relationship and partner mapping exercises
- Elicit and clarify community and stakeholder priorities
- Develop strategies for engaging hard to reach community and stakeholder groups
- Design and facilitate meetings that honor all areas of expertise and ensure that people’s input has a place to go
- Support partner identification and recruitment
- Design meetings to build trust, capacity, and joint problem identification and shared solution development
- Support federal and state partnership programs, working groups, technical advisory committees, and boards and commissions
- Design accessible branding and strategic communications materials based on client, community, and stakeholder input
- Develop communication and outreach plans for the range of intended audiences
- Identify inclusive approaches to communication and outreach, including educational, informing, inviting input or other purposes
- Develop communications plans that are tailored to meet goals and internal capacities
- Draft and create outreach materials and marketing collateral that reflect branding voice and visual style
- Provide logistical outreach support and website and social media management
- Communicate science and data in way that makes it understandable and actionable to improve science-based decision-making
- Draft and execute integrated print and digital marketing campaigns, outreach materials, and social media strategies
- Provide translation services as needed
Funding, Long-Term Financing, and Economic Analysis
- Identify legacy and innovative funding sources
- Design sustainable financing mechanisms
- Conduct feasibility analyses of alternative revenue streams
- Design philanthropic fundraising strategies
- Formulate concept and cultivation strategies to connect with donors and funding streams
- Provide training and technical assistance to enhance funding and financing strategies
- Design institutional arrangements, effective governance models, and operational controls to maximize utilization of funding
- Conduct natural resource and ecosystem service valuations
- Assess program costing, willingness to pay, and financial feasibility
Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning
- Develop frameworks, plans, and tools to assess and measure contribution, causality, and success/impact
- Consider relevant stakeholders to engage in evaluation processes and design solutions for effective engagement throughout the evaluation process
- Design MEL costing plans from local to global scales
- Develop SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely) metrics
- Collect social and ecological baseline and routine monitoring data, including through conducting field visits and site surveys
- Coordinate learning sessions for staff, funders, and partners on progress, best practices, and lessons learned
- Design methods for improving performance and enhancing success through adaptive management
- Define and assess economic, social, and environmental return on investment
- Conduct developmental, formative, real-time, and summative evaluations of organizations, portfolios, programs, and projects
Organizational Design, Governance, and Institutional Arrangements
- Assess feasibility and alignment of organizational structures and institutional arrangements
- Design governance structures, policies, and organizational frameworks
- Develop operational plans to facilitate growth, enhance capacity, and prioritize needs
- Conduct analysis and develop tools to support information and data-based decision-making
- Facilitate executive and board transitions
- Assess and improve performance and workflow
- Create and implement human capital management tools, processes, and systems
- Support organizational recruiting, training, and professional development
- Facilitate mergers and organizational restructuring, including for-profit, nonprofit, and hybrid structures
- Connect information from diverse sources and distill lessons learned to identify opportunities, needs, and generate solutions
Strategic and Operational Planning
- Perform competitive market analyses
- Develop feasibility and needs assessments
- Conduct systems and landscape assessments
- Build integration schemes for multi-sector, bilateral, and multilateral initiatives
- Develop financial forecasting models and budgets
- Execute political and demographic trend analyses, including power mapping
- Design and facilitate strategic planning meetings and retreats
- Develop comprehensive strategic plans
- Design programmatic and sector exit strategies
- Develop and improve climate change adaptation and mitigation programs
- Build sustainable fisheries and protected areas plans
- Develop partnership and joint venture strategies and agreements
- Build innovation pipelines within organizations and help future proof programs
- Conduct organizational and cultural equity assessments—e.g., staff surveys, 360 reviews, self-assessments
- Develop diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, protocols, and toolkits
Climate and Hazard Resilience Planning
For over 15 years, our team has supported multisector adaptation and mitigation projects for federal, state, regional, local, and nonprofit clients. Our approach to resilience is built on equity and sustainability. We support our clients in developing innovative approaches that not only prepare communities for a changing world, but also build a more equitable society. We use a collaborative framework designed to increase capacity through engagement, involving working groups, stakeholders, and communities in each step of the process to identify strategies that enable our clients and their communities to thrive. We collaborate with experts in ERG’s other service areas to bring a powerful breadth and depth of experience and expertise to all our projects from climate science and data, to planning and policy, to implementation, including funding and financing strategies.
Engagement and Communications
We believe that the best projects and the most effective solutions are founded in partnerships. We design public and stakeholder engagement and participation to directly inform the work and broaden the project team, rather than serving as a stand-alone task designed simply to inform. We work closely with our clients and their partners to develop engagement plans that detail opportunities for the public and stakeholders to participate at various points throughout the process. Our meetings and events emphasize exercises and activities that invite hands on involvement in a project’s work. Our services include a range of tools and strategies to engage and communicate at all levels and to all audiences with a focus on building trust, capacity, and transparency.
Engagement and Participation
Communications and Outreach
Funding, Long-Term Financing, and Economic Analysis
Organizations need diversified and scalable funding to achieve long-term goals and build resiliency against dynamic markets. We evaluate and develop sustainable funding models for varied organizations and goals.
Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning
Organizations must continue to learn and evolve to create lasting success. We design and execute monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) frameworks to build organizational cultures of continuous improvement and evaluate programmatic impact. Our work includes an assessment of our client’s current organizational capacity, partnerships, access to resources, and relationships which are critical to the successful implementation of programs, projects, and other initiatives, and necessary to meet their objectives in community and environmental sustainability and resilience.
Organizational Design, Governance, and Institutional Arrangements
Highly functional organizations need effective organizational designs, systems, and policies. We help our clients research, design, and implement organizational models that maximize utilization, efficiency, and impact.
Strategic and Operational Planning
An effective organization, government program, or initiative needs vision, resources, and the capacity to act. We help our clients build strategies and implementation plans that align organizational objectives, market realities, and available resources.
Projects
Comprehensive Update of Massachusetts ResilientMass Plan
Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency
Comprehensive Update of Massachusetts ResilientMass Plan
Challenge
When the Massachusetts State Hazard Mitigation and Climate Adaptation Plan was due for a 5-year update—as required by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—ERG supported the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) in this undertaking, working in collaboration with the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA).
Solution
Because much had changed since 2019, ERG’s support for the Commonwealth included updating all information in the plan and expanding information for many key topic areas, such as human health, environmental justice and equity, critical infrastructure, and natural resources. ERG also integrated new data and information for identifying the highest-priority climate change impacts in Massachusetts; incorporated environmental justice and equity throughout the plan; added data and mapping for environmental justice and other priority populations; integrated new census data; and responded to new FEMA guidance for state hazard mitigation plans. ERG collaborated extensively with MEMA and EEA throughout the process, held a series of working sessions with state agencies, and held drop-in office hours between meetings so that representatives of state agencies could stop by to get questions answered throughout the process. ERG also led engagement with community groups and interested parties in a community meeting series to obtain input on draft state agency actions and through focus groups.
Results
The final plan and executive summary were used to launch the ResilientMass Plan, Massachusetts’ climate and hazard program, which focuses on a sustainable “whole-of-community” approach to climate resilience and hazard risk reduction.
Client
Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency
Related Publications
EPA Workshops Helping Communities Prepare for Natural Disasters
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
EPA Workshops Helping Communities Prepare for Natural Disasters
Challenge
Climate change is causing natural disasters to become more frequent and more intense, putting infrastructure at risk of damage and deterioration. To help communities in EPA Regions 5 and 9—which include parts of the U.S. Midwest and Pacific Southwest—prepare for the increase in disaster debris, ERG helped EPA design, plan, and facilitate two dynamic stakeholder engagement workshop series.
Solution
These series focused on improving community resilience through effective natural disaster debris planning and management, as well as identifying a range of practical steps the federal government and others can take to address gaps and drive innovation around disaster debris management and resilience. Over 100 experts and stakeholders in disaster debris planning and management, disaster response, environmental justice, zero waste, deconstruction, and green building attended the workshops, along with representatives from federal, state, local, and tribal governments; non-governmental organizations; private businesses; and academia.
Results
ERG’s Blue Earth team developed a report outlining takeaways from the workshops, which highlight critical needs for equitable, safe, and resilient infrastructure planning. Input from the workshops has also helped lead to further investments in developing guidance and outreach on disaster debris reduction.
Client
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Related Publications
Resiliency and Natural Disaster Debris Workshops – Summary Report
Climate Resilient Lands Strategy
County of Sonoma
Climate Resilient Lands Strategy
Challenge
In order to build landscape-scale resilience across Sonoma County, the Climate Action and Resilience Division (CARD) in the Sonoma County Administrator’s Office and Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District (Ag + Open Space) asked ERG’s Blue Earth Team to develop a strategy to promote system-wide watershed and ecosystem benefits while building resilience across the county’s varied land types.
Solution
Our team developed a Strategy which identifies the highest priority projects and actions to build resilience across the county. The Strategy also highlights climate hazards Sonoma County faces and projects that could be implemented to build and support climate-resilient lands at the landscape, watershed, and ecoregion scales. To help the County and its partners, plan design, and implement suggested projects we developed a framework and process to support the suggested projects.
The framework includes recommendations for engagement, potential funding sources to support suggested projects, and measurable indicators to ensure accountability.
Results
The Strategy lays out a process and framework for county-wide collaboration in conservation, management, and restoration that can help the county leverage its natural and working lands to support a climate resilient future. ERG’s Blue Earth Team’s work built on previous efforts in the county and beyond, drew on targeted stakeholder input, and considered priorities and objectives for the County to support this comprehensive Strategy. The Board of Supervisors of Sonoma County and Board of Directors of Ag + Open Space approved the Strategy in September, 2022.
Client
County of Sonoma
Related Publications
Laboratory Resilience Assessments
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Laboratory Resilience Assessments
Challenge
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wanted to understand the risk of climate change hazards, identify priority project areas to focus on, and determine adaptation actions for their facilities across the country. They needed a consistent process to prioritize project areas for funding.
Solution
ERG served as the technical lead to develop a framework and methodology to assess EPA facilities for hazards. ERG’s team identified and applied the most appropriate data and climate projections for sites across the country and developed a package of materials to guide the EPA’s prioritization process through vulnerability assessment, risk and consequence, and recommended adaptation actions. ERG worked closely with EPA’s facilities team and science and research teams virtually and in the field to conduct the assessment, identify priorities, and determine high-consequence risks. We designed a decision-making system to provide EPA with a consistent methodology to prioritize projects for funding.
Results
After completing the assessment, we developed findings and recommendations for each facility. Finally, ERG designed all materials for building capacity and understanding with the local teams.
Client
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
News & Publications
February 1, 2024
ERG Supports Comprehensive Update of Massachusetts ResilientMass Plan
ERG Supports Comprehensive Update of Massachusetts ResilientMass Plan
February 1, 2024
When the Massachusetts State Hazard Mitigation and Climate Adaptation Plan was due for a 5-year update—as required by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—ERG supported the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) in this undertaking, working in collaboration with the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA). Because much had changed since 2019, ERG’s support for the Commonwealth included updating all information in the plan and expanding information for many key topic areas, such as human health, environmental justice and equity, critical infrastructure, and natural resources. ERG also integrated new data and information for identifying the highest-priority climate change impacts in Massachusetts; incorporated environmental justice and equity throughout the plan; added data and mapping for environmental justice and other priority populations; integrated new census data; and responded to new FEMA guidance for state hazard mitigation plans. ERG collaborated extensively with MEMA and EEA throughout the process, held a series of working sessions with state agencies, and held drop-in office hours between meetings so that representatives of state agencies could stop by to get questions answered throughout the process. ERG also led engagement with community groups and interested parties in a community meeting series to obtain input on draft state agency actions and through focus groups. The final plan and executive summary were used to launch the ResilientMass Plan, Massachusetts’ climate and hazard program, which focuses on a sustainable “whole-of-community” approach to climate resilience and hazard risk reduction.
Client
Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency
May 3, 2022
NEWS: Blue Earth Team Helps Gather and Share Best Practices and Transferrable Strategies for Coastal Resilience Practitioners
NEWS: Blue Earth Team Helps Gather and Share Best Practices and Transferrable Strategies for Coastal Resilience Practitioners
May 3, 2022
Coastal resilience strategies are crucial for protecting and enhancing shorelines, communities, and ecosystems—and adapting to a changing climate. ERG recently supported the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s (NFWF’s) yearlong effort to gather and share best practices from coastal resilience practitioners, with the goal of enhancing coastal resilience efforts across the United States. ERG reviewed more than 100 grantee reports and peer-reviewed articles and conducted interviews with 60 resilience practitioners. ERG used the findings from this research to develop Coastal Resilience Success Stories, a series of case studies documenting exemplary coastal resilience projects throughout the country. The case studies describe key challenges and highlight transferable strategies for resilience practitioners, providing an important foundation for future resilience efforts. Featured strategies range from conducting ongoing monitoring of the project site to leveraging resources to build local capacity to testing novel approaches. NFWF and ERG’s work will help enhance the technical capacity of resilience practitioners and decision-makers, in addition to strengthening the overall human and ecosystem impacts of coastal resilience projects.
Client
National Fish and Wildlife Foundation
December 28, 2021
NEWS: Blue Earth Writes Report Assessing Coral Reef Conservation Strategy
NEWS: Blue Earth Writes Report Assessing Coral Reef Conservation Strategy
December 28, 2021
Coral reefs are diverse ecosystems that function as a habitat for many species and provide crucial services to communities across the globe. ERG’s Blue Earth team recently produced a report for Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Vibrant Oceans Initiative (VOI) assessing the impacts of coral reef conservation efforts and investments inspired by the 2018 50 Reefs study. The 50 Reefs approach evaluates key threats to corals and prioritizes conservation of coral reefs worldwide that have the greatest potential to survive climate change and repopulate surrounding reefs. Blue Earth’s report for VOI found that the 50 Reefs approach helped organizations and conservation investors prioritize 60 coral reef ecosystems across more than 40 countries—and that it is a successful approach for guiding conservation efforts of coral reefs in the future. To compose the report, Blue Earth reviewed documents related to 50 Reefs-inspired conservation efforts, in addition to conducting interviews with 28 informants representing conservation organizations and investors. The strategies highlighted in the report will pave the way for further coral reef conservation in a rapidly changing world.
Client
Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Vibrant Oceans Initiative
February 22, 2021
NEWS: Development of a Regional Coastal Integrated Information Management System (RCIIMS)
NEWS: Development of a Regional Coastal Integrated Information Management System (RCIIMS)
February 22, 2021
There is an urgent need to scale up investments in climate risk and resilience measures for highly vulnerable Caribbean countries and give resource managers and practitioners the tools necessary for incorporating resilience into their planning and development models. To respond to this need, the University of West Indies, Mona – Pilot Program for Climate Resilience hired ERG’s Blue Earth Consultants division to develop the Regional Coastal Integrated Information Management System (RCIIMS). The RCIIMS is an online platform of coastal and marine metadata and supports ongoing national Pilot Program for Climate Resilience (PPCR) programs in the six Caribbean PPCR countries (Dominica, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines). The RCIIMS provides centralized access to climate-related metadata, informs research and climate analysis, promotes education and awareness, and fosters development of a community of data producers and users across the region. The Blue Earth/ERG team conducted a review of existing datasets and led stakeholder interviews and virtual beta tests to determine requirements for the RCIIMS. The RCIIMS is the first project ERG has implemented using the open Open-Source Data Portal Platform CKAN, which has rich features for open data, data and file stores, geospatial data, metadata and data search, discovery, and visualization.
Client
University of West Indies, Mona - Pilot Program for Climate Resilience
About Us
We specialize in developing sustainable and resilient solutions to complex social and environmental issues that our clients confront in urban communities and natural systems.