CCS Leads Scoping Session for Virginia Resilience Academy
April 22, 2026. The Center for Climate Strategies (CCS) led the second session of the 2026 Virginia Resiliency Academy, hosted by Resilient Virginia, a statewide nonprofit that connects government, nonprofit, business, community, and academic sectors to advance practical resilience solutions across the Commonwealth. Running since 2020, the Academy delivers timely webinar sessions that build the knowledge, skills, and leadership capacity of resilience practitioners working in Virginia communities.
Tom Peterson, CCS President and CEO, delivered the session "Scoping Resilience Issues and Engagements," drawing on CCS's applied framework for structured, multi-phase community problem solving in the face of rapidly changing economic, energy, and environmental conditions.
The session introduced participants to Phase 1 of CCS's four phase, ten-step planning framework for resilience improvements centered on three foundational scoping steps, including: 1) defining the problem and need, 2) mapping affected and interested audiences, and 3) designing an effective and collaborative solution process. As Peterson framed it, "the goal of scoping is not to solve the problem, it is to diagnose it and design steps for its resolution."
To ground the framework in current Virginia conditions, the session drew on three converging changes of conditions and impact drivers: 1) surging electricity demand (load growth) led by data center growth in Northern Virginia, 2) expanded flood risk estimated through a new statewide flood risk model (FATHOM) that updates current FEMA maps and significantly expands geographic mapping of flood risk, and 3) inflationary pressures that place new burdens on households and businesses, such as from energy and health care costs.
The load growth example was explored in depth, illustrating how an electric power system issue can rapidly become a community-level debate about affordability, land use, equity, and public health, as it has in the Northern Virginia Region. This includes local debates in Loudoun County and Prince William County as well as state activity through the State Corporation Commission (SCC) hearings on proposed 500 kV transmission infrastructure along with discussions on differentiated rates for industrial customers, and removal of distributed renewable energy connection barriers.
The session also offered practical guidance on integrating AI tools into scoping and analysis work to accelerate and reduce costs involved in research while minimizing mistakes. Participants engaged in live polls and discussion on their most pressing scoping challenges, problem definition methods, and audience mapping approaches.
The Virginia Resiliency Academy reflects a natural alignment between Resilient Virginia's mission to build statewide resilience capacity and CCS's work on applied resilience planning and analysis. CCS's contributions to this year's Academy build on prior Virginia work, including the "Exposure to Climate Risks and Hazards" chapter of the Virginia's first State Climate Assessment and the “Resilience, Public Engagement, and Community Problem Solving” short course developed in partnership with George Mason University's Accelerating Research Translation (ART) program.
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See more about CCS’ work in Virginia
