Forecasting and Responding to Changing Conditions in Virginia Communities
December 19, 2025. As part of the Accelerating Research Translation (ART) program with George Mason University, The Center for Climate Strategies (CCS) launched a new Continuing and Professional Education (CPE) course, “Resilience, Public Engagement, and Community Problem Solving,” completed in December, 2025. The short course helps local government and community analysts, program developers, and managers forecast and respond to emerging risks and vulnerabilities that cut across energy, economic, and environmental sectors. Its practitioner-based orientation focuses on real-world capacities for resilience planning and assessment through a combination of online modules and live instruction that review concepts, theory, practices, guidelines, case examples, and practical tools needed to conduct public engagement and structured community problem solving.
The practical framework focuses on coordinated actions to:
Define and frame resilience challenges by connecting underlying risk drivers with vulnerability gaps and solution strategies across economic sectors and natural systems.
Design engagement processes that emphasize collaborative group decisions, shared problem definition, two-way communication, and consensus-building rather than relying on one-way outreach.
Translate complex conditions into actionable choices using structured, stepwise, multi objective problem-solving approaches to define problems, assess needs, create and evaluate choices, prioritize actions, and move decision making groups toward implementation.
This integrated framework is intended for direct use in local and regional planning, issue assessment, stakeholder engagement, policy and program design, and project development, particularly where communities face compounding hazards, infrastructure and resource constraints, and rapidly changing conditions.
This course was developed and delivered alongside CCS’s broader resilience and research-translation work at Mason, including the release of Virginia’s first State Climate Assessment, by the Virginia Climate Center and the “Exposure to Climate Risks and Hazards” chapter written by CCS.
CCS will build on this first Mason CPE offering to repeat and expand applied practices for research translation and professional learning. Stay tuned for future CPE offerings building on this foundation.
