A small state with a big climate plan

Inside Rhode Island’s efforts to pair statewide risk ranking with a permanent resilience loan fund and bottom‑up municipal planning

A version of this case study was published by The Resiliency Company’s Epicenter site, where I am a guest contributor.

Rhode Island, one of the most densely populated states in the US, has 400 miles of coastline, short and shallow rivers, and sprawling watersheds in which most of its population lives. Over the last 15 years, it’s seen cataclysmic inland flooding, a few tornadoes, and rapidly rising sea levels wearing away at its coast. The physical effects of climate change are being felt, right now, in Rhode Island. But the state plans to be a safer, more stable place to live in 50 years.

Rhode Island is both anticipating and, crucially, finding ways to begin to pay for the improved infrastructure its cities and towns need, even as the current federal administration draws back from funding climate adaptation projects. From new legislation, science-driven prioritization of investments, and innovative financing vehicles to meaningful community engagement, Rhode Island’s active and well-organized all-of-government work on adaptation is groundbreaking. The Ocean State may be small—population about a million, squished between Connecticut and Massachusetts—but it is mighty.

To understand what’s going on in Rhode Island, you have to start with governance. Power in the state mostly resides in the legislature—its constitution calls for a weaker executive function and a strong legislative branch. Legislators in Rhode Island are focused on serving their constituents by paying attention to climate-driven harms and risks—they’re hearing about a lot of flooding—and have steadily voted for funding and programs that support adaptation work. To plan, finance, and implement that work, two state-level entities are coordinating closely: the Department of Environmental Management (DEM), led by Director Terrence Gray, where the state’s Chief Resilience Officer, Kimberly Korioth, is housed, and the Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank (RIIB or the Bank), led by William Fazioli. Together, these entities—the legislature, led since 2021 by Speaker of the House Joseph Shekarchi, DEM, and RIIB—are working what looks like bureaucratic magic, informed by top-notch climate science.

Next month, in January 2026, Rhode Island will have a statewide document ranking 10,000 crucial assets—infrastructure, healthcare facilities, emergency service—according to their prioritization for adaptation funding. A state revolving fund will be ready to loan money for multi-million-dollar resilience projects, and grant funding will be ready for smaller design efforts, all of it supported by bond proceeds authorized by the legislature. Lists of projects to fund, in turn, have been created over the last six years by each of the 39 cities and towns in the state through their participation in a Municipal Resilience Program convened by The Nature Conservancy. In Providence, additional climate-science-informed planning for projects to be funded under the statewide plan (called “Resilient Rhody 2025”) is being driven by the Providence Resilience Partnership in a program called Climate Ready Together.

This many-pronged effort is not starting from scratch. The Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank and its partners have a long history of getting successful projects done—the Bank has already loaned out $2 billion for clean water-related projects across the state. What’s new about this effort is that it combines rigorous statewide climate resilience planning and ranking with finance, directing where funds should be spent rather than sending money out in reaction to ad hoc requests. It’s also aimed at ensuring ongoing, sustainable funding.

The state money won’t be enough to fill the enormous need for adaptation funding left by the exit of the federal government, says DEM Director Terrence Gray: “We’ll never going to fill the gap created by federal changes,” he says. But the state is “working through what we need to do to get the plans in place, and get the systems in place, and then do what we can with local fundraising,” Gray says. RIIB’s Executive Director and CEO William Fazioli, who has played a significant part in transforming the Bank’s role to meet this moment, repeats a saying popularized by President Theodore Roosevelt: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

The effects of physical climate change are being felt across Rhode Island, in the form of extreme heat and wildfires as well as flooding. But if you want to see a dramatic example of what’s happening, there’s no better place to look than the southeast coast of Block Island, where the Mohegan Bluffs, about 150 feet high, have retreated hundreds of feet.

This side of the small glacial island, which sits about ten miles south of the mainland, is eroding away, attacked from below and above by waves and rain made stronger by the changing climate. DEM maintains a steep staircase running from the overlook at the top of the bluff to the beach below. It has had to close it recently because erosion at the stairway’s base keeps washing out its last section and creating a dangerous drop to the beach. What’s the future of this stairway? What values does the stairway serve? If it’s “access to the beach,” is there another way to provide this? Keeping things exactly as they are may no longer make sense.

This is same calculation Rhode Island needs to make for thousands of critical assets, pieces of infrastructure, and public services across the state that are threatened by the effects of climate change. To its credit, the state has been taking adaptation seriously for several years. In 2017, then-Governor Gina Raimundo made resiliency a priority, appointing Sean O’Rourke as the state’s first Chief Resiliency Officer (then housed at the Bank). The following year, under O’Rourke’s leadership, the state’s first comprehensive climate resilience strategy, “Resilient Rhody,” was published and identified places that were at risk. But cities and towns had no pathway for accessing funds to address the adaptation needs that the first Resilient Rhody plan identified.

The next step took six years. All 39 cities and towns went through individual workshops facilitated by The Nature Conservancy (and coordinated with DEM and RIIB) that brought together representatives of different groups to work on municipal resilience plans. “We just completed the last town a couple of months ago,” Tim Mooney, director of marketing communications for the Rhode Island chapter of the Nature Conservancy said recently. “Coming out of the workshop process,” he says, “they all get a report which lays out the challenges and opportunities and vulnerabilities, and an actionable list of [climate resilience steps] that the town or city wants to work on.”

A key incentive for city/town involvement in the Municipal Resilience Program, or MRP, was that going through it was a requirement—no workshop, no eligibility for Bank grant funds to implement listed projects. Initially, Mooney says, “some inland communities looked at [resiliency] as a coastal issue” and there was some political resistance as well. But everyone eventually got on board. “Each community has identified a whole boatload of projects that can be funded,” says the Bank’s Fazioli. The weather helped: record rainfall, flash flooding, and storms pounded the entire state in 2024 and 2025, two tornadoes touched down in 2024, and the fall of 2024 marked a historic wildfire season—75 fires, with 41 of them recorded between October 18 and November 19.

The Bank started making grants for eligible projects in participating cities right away—requiring a 25 percent match—and has awarded about $24-$25 million in grants since 2019, supporting many sub-$1 million infrastructure improvements aimed at flood control and stormwater management, among other resilience priorities. But demand is routinely four or five times greater than available money: In January 2024, Governor McKee and RIIB announced $12 million in MRP Action Grants, but noted that for this round “the Infrastructure Bank received 41 proposals from 30 communities, totaling $52 million in grant requests…far exceeding currently available funding.”​

Good projects were funded and constructed using this grant money. Woonsocket’s Truman Road reconstruction project, completed in 2024, is just one example.

Truman Drive used to be a four-lane bypass speedfest. The road kept Woonsocket’s Main Street, which runs parallel to it, freer of traffic, but its asphalt allowed pollutants to flow into the Blackstone River nearby while simultaneously keeping stormwater from seeping into the ground. Here’s what the situation looked like in 2019:

The Department of Transportation took out one of the traffic lanes and installed a bike path running along Truman Drive in 2019, but only a Jersey barrier shielded bikers from the highway—a threatening and unattractive setting for cyclists and pedestrians. There was still too much impermeable asphalt, so stormwater wasn’t being managed. There was no shade for pedestrians or cyclists, and it was very difficult for either group to access Main Street or the bike path. During the MRP process in 2020, Woonsocket, a former mill city that has struggled economically, listed the Blackstone River and Truman Drive as two “areas of concern,” and said it wanted to “convert Truman Drive to a two-lane road with former lanes used to manage runoff from Truman Drive and Main Street.”

An EPA-funded regional program, the Southeast New England Program (SNEP), gave a $25,000 planning grant, which allowed several public and private partners to access additional funding that responded to Woonsocket’s Truman Drive MRP desires: $500,000 came from EPA’s SNEP Watershed Implementation Grants 2023, and $2 million came from the Bank. Woonsocket couldn’t meet its match requirement for either grant, but the Rhode Island DOT is under an obligation from the EPA to spend $100 million reducing polluted stormwater discharges from its highways—and the project would be doing just that, so RIDOT supplied some of the matching funds and got credit from the EPA for doing so.

Within five years after Woonsocket went through the MRP process, the project was fully built. Much of the impervious surface was removed to cut heat and pollution, pedestrian and bike connectivity to Main Street was substantially enhanced, and stormwater management was installed. From Fazioli’s perspective, the Truman Drive Greenway “was basically a flood, a stormwater project, but it turned into this really great improvement to a local roadway that was prone to high-speed traffic fatalities.” The project has innumerable co-benefits, according to TNC’s Mooney: “Having the chance to remove a quarter mile of pavement and replace it with park space—that’s a winner,” he says. “And doing it in a way that captures stormwater at the same time and keeps pollution out of the Blackstone River!” he continues. “The best projects are ones that you can like for lots of different reasons.”

Here’s what Truman Drive looks like now:

Celicia Boyden, an engineer with architecture firm Fuss & O’Neil who was the project manager for the Truman Drive Greenway effort, says people in Woonsocket “really see it as an improvement and an investment.” Boyden thinks “what made all the difference is that the community was really engaged” through the MRP process. (You can see short videos about the project here.)

From Boyden’s perspective, the Bank is “an incredible resource.” She continues: “We use them a lot on projects, connecting municipalities with their funding, and they’re really great to work with.” For Boyden, the relatively quick completion of the Truman Drive Greenway signals that Rhode Island is “pretty forward thinking in terms of resiliency—and really putting their money where their mouth is in getting projects constructed.”

The Bank will keep doggedly giving out MRP grant money to worthy projects—choosing carefully among the many applications it receives for each dollar. But the Bank’s MRP grant funds are never going to be sufficient. The Truman Drive Greenway, with all its co-benefits, received one of the largest Bank resilience grants when that check for $2 million arrived. Most grants are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But it is a small project, completed for about $3.5 million. Serious infrastructure often costs tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to plan and build.

Two major pieces of recent Rhode Island legislation are in place that will move the state forward in its climate resilience planning. One establishes a revolving loan fund, the Resilient Rhody Infrastructure Fund, to be administered by the Bank, focused on funding multi-million dollar resilience projects. The other calls for the creation of a statewide resiliency plan by the end of this year (”Resilient Rhody 2025”). That plan will rigorously prioritize which assets across the state—roads, facilities, and emergency services—should be first in line for adaptation investment. Together with meaningful community engagement—a crucial third element, foreshadowed by the six-year MRP process facilitated by The Nature Conservancy—Rhode Island will, with any luck, be able to piece together the political buy-in, rigorous planning, and initial financing essential to its long-term survival.

Revolving loan funds are elegant and powerful tools that have been working well at the state level for fifty years. The RIIB has extensive experience with clean water-related revolving loans, and has used this financing vehicle to spread $2 billion across Rhode Island for clean water/clean energy projects. Now that idea—nearly magical in its flywheel effects over time—will be put to work in service of very broadly defined “municipal resilience” projects: The legislation authorizing the Resilient Rhody Infrastructure Fund, approved in June 2025 without a single vote against it, says the fund is “for the purpose of providing…financial assistance to local governmental units for resiliency and stormwater abatement projects,” and directs the Bank to “write rules and approve “projects to be financed through the…fund,” without narrowing “resiliency” in any way.

Think of revolving funds as savings accounts for reducing climate risk. Initial funding provides “seed capital,” a small lump of money that keeps working and grows over time. In Rhode Island, that seed capital will come in the form of bond proceeds authorized by the legislature—so far, $10 million from a June 2024 bond referendum, to which the Bank hopes to add another $20 million in November 2026—plus some additional capital the Bank has on hand. The Bank will make loans from that seed capital, and as the loans are paid back the money will go back into the fund—allowing it to make more loans. That growing capital can then be regularly amplified with bond funds. It will grow and grow and grow.

“Grants are wonderful things,” says William Fazioli, “but they get depleted.” He continues. “We’ve got a really strong track record” in running a revolving loan fund for clean water projects. “So we wanted to introduce it for the resiliency.” This fund ensures the Bank can help meet overwhelming demand for resilient infrastructure in a revolving, sustainable way. “We think that for every $1 we put in, we can support $3 worth of projects just because of the nature of the payback stream,” he says.

What projects should be funded? That’s where the second key piece of legislation fits in. In June 2024, the Rhode Island legislature passed the Act on Coasts, requiring the state’s Chief Resilience Officer (housed within DEM) to “conduct a comprehensive assessment of the climate risks related to sea level rise for coastal and riverine communities” and deliver a statewide plan by the end of 2025. Terrence Gray of DEM says the plan will prioritize investments in particular assets in light of their vulnerability to hazards and the role they play in the state’s wellbeing. “We’re working through a logical process to look at all our assets and then to prioritize them based on risk,” says Gray. “It could be anything from coastal risks to inland flooding risk, to heat risk, all the different climate related risks that come up,” he continues.

The obvious trouble is that different assets—public infrastructure, safety and medical facilities, natural systems—are apples and oranges. How do you rank them for investment? Gray says this effort is a work in progress but that the published plan will contain exactly this kind of assessment. The question to be answered, according to Gray, is: “What value [does an asset have] to society and how critical is it?” Arup, the firm chosen to conduct this resilience study, is working through a model that will result in a “manageable set of priorities,” Gray says. “So we could have an inner-city health center that’s highly susceptible to heat risk that’s prioritized over a coastal sewer pump station that may be prioritized based on sea level rise,” he says. “Our goal is to develop a system [for funding] very analogous to what we deal with in wastewater infrastructure,” says Gray, where a project priority list is created that guides the Bank in how it spends its funds. “This will cover everything” about the state, Gray says, even though the title of the document will read “coastal resiliency plan.”

Some part of this prioritization will include thinking ahead to support Rhode Island communities that are planning to be higher and drier places for people to live, work, and play. Gray points to Warren, Rhode Island, which has been working on a project looking at underutilized upland space that could be a new downtown for the city--rather than its Market Street area, which is “very susceptible to sea level rise and storm surge,” according to Gray. The project, called Market to Metacom (for Metacom Avenue, to which relocation is possible), has been in planning stages for years, with extensive community discussion. “It’s just the question of getting the appropriate level of funding to keep the wheels turning” says Gray. He says he can “name three or four other communities that should be doing this.”

This is long-term thinking that will require substantial investment—exactly the kind of planning that Gray wants to encourage and that Fazioli’s revolving fund could make real.

The third crucial element for Rhode Island, beyond rigorous prioritization and sustainable funding, will be buy-in at every level. So far, the population seems broadly supportive. Tim Mooney witnessed much of the 39-city MRP process, and says the meetings are “always civil, they’re always positive, they’re always creative.” “It’s nice to be reminded that those conversations are still possible,” he adds. The legislature is unanimous—so far—and the executive branch is aligned and coordinating closely.

Current climate-science-informed community engagement work being carried out by the Providence Resilience Partnership may turn out to be a model for the rest of the country. So far, the process is oversubscribed and going well. Eight cohorts of community members across Providence are meeting monthly for nine months to learn together about the latest climate science so that they can understand, in detail, what is likely to happen to their neighborhood over the next few decades. Sixty percent of the cohort members are Spanish-speaking, but with simultaneous translation “people feel comfortable talking,” says Michele Jalbert, the executive director of the Providence Resilience Partnership, who is spearheading this work with community cohorts, called Climate Ready Together.

The idea is that people who have gone through this months-long experience, and have considered and discussed the assets near them that are threatened, will be ready to speak up for themselves within the governance context that operates in the state—because they will understand who is responsible for doing what and where the money is coming from, as well as the climate reality they face.

These cohorts will be in dialogue with climate scientists and engineers from Arcadis, another consultancy, that has been retained by the city of Providence to carry out a comprehensive, citywide climate vulnerability assessment and to develop a Citywide Roadmap for Climate Resilience. Arcadis is getting Providence ready to apply for the Bank’s revolving loan funding as well as any federal funding that may reappear someday, and their work will incorporate what they learn from Providence’s Climate Ready Together cohorts.

​ “We want people in Providence to face climate change with confidence,” Jalbert says. She is focused on ensuring that good, clear, long term scientific projections are informing both the discussions these cohorts are having and the projects and plans that the Bank’s revolving fund will support. “We could spend so much money solving the wrong problems,” she says. “The value of investing now, as we’re seeing the problem growing, and doing it in a really smart way... you can’t underestimate the value of that,” Jalbert adds. The Bank and Fazioli have created an “amazing opportunity,” in Jalbert’s view, with a revolving fund that will be sustainable over time. Importantly, from her perspective, “it’s geared toward the communities that are really working together to figure out the problems and then come up with the right solutions.” She wants Providence to be ready, and she anticipates that community cohort members will be playing key roles in the process.

Statewide prioritization, sustainable funding, and broad-based buy-in: these elements are designed to add up to a framework for thoughtful planning and investment. But Rhode Island is not Oz. It will be important, DEM’s Terrence Gray says, to get “enough money to continue to move at an acceptable pace.” The revolving fund must grow quickly and projects must get built so that people see results. Soon. “That’s going to be a big [barrier] to get over,” he adds.

And that’s not the only risk. “The other thing that makes me nervous is we’re one major storm away from not worrying about the future and worrying about the present,” Gray says.

He continues. “If we get hit with a big disaster, then people will be focused on recovery and response. And I’m hoping that we’re far enough along in our planning that when that happens, people will be able to take the plan and say, ‘All right, this is how we need to rebuild or recover.’”

In March 2010, the worst floods in Rhode Island history caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to homes, businesses, and infrastructure. According to the Providence Journal, “Three days of rain saturated the state, closing I-95 for days, inundating Warwick Mall, and destroying hundreds of homes across the Pawtuxet and Blackstone watersheds.” Afterward, people rebuilt what they had lost, and today little has changed that truly lowers risks in those flooded watersheds.

Now Rhode Island is determined not to repeat this mistake. It has a host of plans, projections, and institutions aimed at making the state safer. “People are ready to move forward,” says Celicia Boyden. This small state has a big idea: If money flows quickly, projects get built, and the Resilient Rhody plan works as planned, the state will be a better and safer place to live decades from now.