EPA Offering Climate Change Risk Assessment Technical Assistance for Water Sector Utilities

EPA’s Water Infrastructure and Cyber Resilience Division (WICRD) announced it will be offering water and wastewater utilities no-cost climate change risk assessment technical assistance as part of its Creating Resilient Water Utilities (CRWU) initiative. The deadline to apply for the assistance program is August 15, 2024.

According to WICRD, the technical assistance process comprises a team of experts that will work one-on-one with utility owners and operators, utilizing online CRWU tools, including the Resilient Strategies Guide and the Climate Resilience Evaluation and Awareness Tool, to assist utility stakeholders with adaptation planning and monetized risk assessment.

Over the course of two to four months, water sector utilities will be guided through a risk assessment process to:

• Better understand their potential risk to climate change threats;
• Identify potential adaptive measures to become more resilient to those threats; and
• Identify potential funding sources for implementation of those potential adaptive measures.

At the conclusion of the assessment, the utility will receive a final report detailing the findings of the risk assessment conducted for its use. To see what other utilities have already completed a climate change risk assessment with CRWU, visit WICRD’s Adaptation Case Studies Map.

Accordingly, CRWU has opened a “Call for Utilities,” encouraging those interested in no-cost climate change risk assessment technical assistance to apply by August 15th, 2024, by emailing Aliza Furneaux (Fu************@*pa.gov).

Selected utilities will be notified in early September 2024.  Scheduling of the technical assistance assessment will begin in late September or early October of 2024. EPA will assign selected utilities a start-date of either October 2024, or January, April, or July 2025.

Read more and sign up for the no-cost assistance at EPA.