Mary Woles, resilience adaptation coordinator in the Climate Action Office, told the House Energy and Digital Infrastructure Committee on March 28 that the agency will complete a Resilience Implementation Strategy (RIS) by July 1 and use it to prioritize state-level resilience needs and identify ways to fund them.

The RIS, Woles said, was announced by the governor and the treasurer in early 2024 and later was incorporated into the Climate Superfund Act (Act 122). "The resilience implementation strategy will be complete on July first of this year and is intended to complement the completion of the climate action plan," Woles said.

The nut graf: the Climate Action Office presented a three-phase effort intended to catalog existing state resilience work, identify gaps and opportunities, and then partner with the treasurer’s office to estimate costs and potential financing for prioritized investments. The presenters said the strategy is meant to focus on state government activities — and to identify where state action can be scaled or where other partners might take responsibility — rather than to be a comprehensive list of every non‑state project.

Evan Horn, resilience lens coordinator in the Climate Action Office, described the first-phase intake and inventory process. "We identified 333 different state initiatives across 30 state departments, divisions, boards, and offices that live in a dynamic database that we hope to make public later on this year," Horn said. He said staff asked agencies about hazards addressed, scale of implementation, decision criteria, funding sources, equity considerations and whether resilience is an explicit outcome of the initiative.

Woles and Horn said the office grouped initiatives under six cross-cutting topics — community, nature-based solutions, infrastructure, early warning systems, economic and environmental sustainability, and an all‑of‑government systems component — and then moved from high‑level opportunities to concrete actions during a workshop earlier in the week. Horn said the Monday workshop drew 113 external and state attendees who began identifying steps that could scale or strengthen existing programs.

The treasurer’s office, the presenters said, is leading a parallel working group to inventory funding and financing options and to consider two categories of needs: immediate post‑crisis financial flexibility and proactive, pre‑disaster adaptation investments. Woles noted that the Climate Superfund Act sets a cost‑recovery mechanism aimed at holding certain fossil fuel extractors and refiners financially responsible for historic emissions harms; she said litigation challenging aspects of that act is pending.

Committee members pressed presenters on how the office will prioritize actions, whether the strategy will identify "shovel ready" projects, and how state agencies will share project lists and decision criteria. Woles and Horn said the RIS will aim to identify concrete, implementable steps and to coordinate with agencies that already maintain project lists and prioritization tools — such as the Agency of Transportation and Vermont Emergency Management — though they said exact prioritization criteria and implementation roles remained under development.

Presenters described additional outreach: an online survey on a draft resilience vision already completed, the recent workshop, further public engagement planned for May and plans to publish the finalized RIS and the database of initiatives in summer 2025. They emphasized that many items the RIS will recommend depend on funding and administrative capacity; the office said implementation timing will depend on available resources.

Ending: The Climate Action Office said it will publish the RIS and related materials after additional internal review and public engagement; the treasurer’s working group will supply funding and financing recommendations that the office expects to reference in the Climate Action Plan and the RIS. The committee took questions after the presentation.