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Advancing Adaptation Throughout California

The biennial California Adaptation Forum (CAF) aims to gather California’s adaptation community to foster knowledge exchange, innovation, and mutual support to accelerate adaptation efforts and create equitable and resilient communities throughout the state. CAF provides an inclusive space for community leaders, decision-makers, technical experts, and on-the-ground practitioners working across California to connect, discuss, and learn about new policies and tools, project successes and lessons learned, and emerging opportunities to build climate resilience in the near-term and over the coming decades.

Inspired by the National Adaptation Forum (NAF), the inaugural 2014 CAF convened 800 leaders in Sacramento, and two additional in-person forums have been organized since – CAF 2016 in Long Beach and CAF 2018 in Sacramento. Due to COVID health and safety concerns, CAF 2020 featured a 3-part webinar series on the nexus of climate and community resilience, and CAF 2021 was organized as a 5-month virtual workshop series to explore solutions to common challenges faced by California’s adaptation community.

CAF is hosted and organized by CivicWell (formerly the Local Government Commission), in partnership with the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research. Each CAF is made possible through the generous contributions from forum sponsors, expert guidance from advisory committee members, outreach support from promotional partners, and active engagement from session organizers, presenters, facilitators, and participants. With hundreds of individuals contributing to the success of each forum, CAF represents a collective effort to build a dynamic program that leverages our time together to build our broader movement.

A significant factor in the success of CAF is its appeal to leaders from a diverse range of sectors and disciplines. CAF’s diverse audience includes local, regional, state, and federal agencies, community-based organizations and nonprofits, Tribal Nations and Native-led organizations, academic institutions and researchers, technical experts, private sector leaders, students, and other leaders working in and across a broad range of climate issue areas. The CAF program is intentionally centered in equity and designed to feature relevant content for its diverse audience – from extreme heat to sea level rise, urban planning to forest management, planning to implementation, and beyond.