Rural climate resilience through built-environment interventions: modified deliberation with analysis as a tool to address barriers to adaptive capacity

The public health impacts of climate change, and how they can be addressed through implementable built-environment interventions in non-agricultural-based rural communities, is an understudied area in the academic literature and adaptation planning practice, particularly in the United States. This paper addresses this gap in understanding through a pilot project that developed a climate and health-adaptation plan with Marquette County, a geographically large, coastal, non-agricultural-based, rural community in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. We show how the Deliberation with Analysis model of public participation, supported by visualizations and followed by post-participant surveys to measure its impact on barriers to adaptive capacity, can be used effectively to overcome barriers to adaptive capacity identified in the literature, specifically in understudied non-agricultural-based, rural, coastal communities in the United States. This study contributes to academic debates on adaptation and rurality by displaying the utility of a method that overcomes these key barriers to adaptive capacity noted in past research, specifically a lack of public awareness, a lack of or difficulty understanding climate information, a lack of leadership, and limited coordination and competing priorities.