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Meridian is providing ongoing strategy development, process design, and facilitation support to the congressionally-funded Community and Regional Resilience Initiative (CARRI) to increase communities’ resilience to natural and man-made disasters. The Initiative is a major component of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Southeast Region Research Initiative (SERRI) and is a multi-year effort focused on: collecting, validating, and disseminating the state of knowledge about community resilience; working with partner communities to learn how to measure and increase a community’s resilience, and making available practical tools to help communities assess their resiliency status and systematically take steps towards enhancement.
CARRI’s long-term goal is to create a template that communities can use to help themselves become more resilient. This resilience framework will allow communities to objectively demonstrate their resilience and become officially designated resilient communities through an accreditation system. CARRI is beginning this process with three partner communities: Gulfport, Mississippi; Memphis, Tennessee; and Charleston, South Carolina. Meridian is helping to design and manage CARRI’s partner community activities by bringing together the multiple stakeholders in each community who can influence resilience and facilitating their assessment and action planning activities. At the national level, Meridian is helping CARRI to build broad support for, and an understanding of a nationally accepted community resilience accreditation system.
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Meridian Institute serves as Coalition Co-Coordinator and manages the policy consensus building process for the United States Climate Action Partnership. USCAP members include major businesses and leading environmental organizations that reached agreement upon a Call for Action on climate change legislation announced in January 2007. Since that time, USCAP members have worked diligently to build upon the principles and recommendations outlined in the Call for Action, underscoring the urgent need for a national policy framework on climate change. Most recently, USCAP has forwarded to Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John Warner (R-VA) USCAP's views on their efforts to advance comprehensive climate legislation, the Lieberman-Warner Climate Bill, “America’s Climate Security Act of 2007” (S.2191).
Meridian Institute has facilitated policy negotiations among USCAP members to further develop policy principles and recommendations for a mandatory U.S. climate program. This summer, USCAP published recommendations on energy efficiency and geologic carbon storage, and members expect to soon deliver policy recommendations on other critical issues related to the structure of a cap-and-trade program. Meridian has also helped facilitate the expansion of USCAP membership from its 14 founding members to a robust group of 33 organizations, including 27 companies, ranging from oil and gas to manufacturers to insurers, and 6 major nongovernmental organizations. For more information on USCAP activities and membership, check the USCAP website at www.us-cap.org.
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