Caitlin Cain, vice president and director of Rural LISC, is no stranger to natural disasters. As a 20-year resident of New Orleans, she’s lived through devastating storms alongside her neighbors and friends. As a community and economic development professional, she’s also thought hard about how to protect lives and communities from the most destructive impacts of flood, wind, and fire

Cain is here to share an unsettling message: “climate change is going to win.” We can expect to see weather-related disasters intensify and become more frequent. But that doesn’t mean we’re down for the count. There’s a great deal we can do to prepare communities to both withstand climate disasters in the first place and bounce back more readily in their aftermath. Community development financial institutions (CDFIs) have a central role to play, especially in helping to prepare historically under-resourced communities that invariably suffer most when disaster strikes.

We spoke with Cain to get her thoughts on creating a smart resiliency agenda—and it involves what she calls “a mind shift.”

Tell us a little bit about what happened to you and your family just a few weeks ago during Hurricane Ida.

I've lived through quite a few of these hurricanes and natural disasters. Katrina [2005] was a water event. The levees breached and a substantial percentage of the city was just inundated with floodwaters. And it sat for weeks and weeks. That led to a lot of destruction across the city.

This time, the levees held—a testament to the level of infrastructure investment that’s been put into the city since Katrina. So it was never a breach event, which was phenomenal. But it was a wind event. It tested a whole other type of infrastructure—the power grid. The power grid completely went down in the city and the adjacent areas. We were left without power for quite some time.

Can you elaborate on how the investment strategy can take climate change by the horns?

Providing capacity support on the front end is incredibly important. That means deploying more capacity assistance dollars so that these organizations—whether it's a CDC doing housing and workforce development, an economic development organization, or a public-private venture—to more seamlessly integrate adaptation strategies as part of their internal planning efforts.  .

Read the full article about climate resiliency from LISC.