The Missing Link: Understanding community capacity to build climate-resilient places

Mapping capacity for climate resilience

By planning for flooding, storms and heatwaves now, councils can protect services, support local people, and prevent future harm. This report shows how understanding community capacity can make climate action feel fairer and more effective.

Community capacity refers to local networks and organisations that people trust and turn to. These include charities, voluntary groups, mutual aid networks, social enterprises, and community hubs. They can help councils reach people who face the greatest risk from climate change, and who are most likely to be left out of the net zero transition.

The report helps local authorities first understand that impacts are not felt equally. People on low incomes, older people, disabled people and some minority ethnic communities can face higher exposure and more barriers to support.

It offers a practical step-by-step guide so councils can analyse community capacity within its climate risk assessments. Piloted with Derry & Strabane, Warrington and Southampton councils, the approach combines climate risk data with measures of socioeconomic vulnerability and the mapping of local community organisations.

The methodology helps councils overlay areas of high climate risk that overlap with low community capacity to identify the hotspots that require the most urgent support. It also helps councils build on where there are already strong networks, highlight gaps in the provision of information and funding, and improve wider, connected services such as health and social care.

By combining climate risk with a real map of community capacity, councils can ensure the right support reaches the right people at the right time so local places can not only be resilient, but thrive.

Key findings

• Mapping community organisations alongside climate risk can reveal hotspots where extra support and trusted local partners are most needed.
• Strong local networks can help delivery move faster, especially when councils fund and back groups that communities already trust.
• A shared community directory can strengthen emergency response and day-to-day services, improving reach into groups facing higher risk.