Report: Feds must help communities adapt to climate change

A panel of state and local officials from around the country sent dozens of suggestions to the White House Monday on how the federal government can help communities deal with climate change.

The group was focused not on mitigating climate change, but rather on how to deal with changes communities are already seeing — "building resilient infrastructure, looking at public health impacts of climate change, building a safe and accessible water supply," said Karen Diver, chairwoman of the Fond du Lac Ojibwe Band near Duluth and the only Minnesotan on the President's State, Local and Tribal Leaders Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience.

Her reservation was hit by record flooding two years ago from a massive rain storm that's expected to become more common in a warmer climate.

Many communities "don't necessarily have the level of infrastructure that would be needed to have a lot of the technical tools," she said.

The federal government has released an online toolkit that gives local planners access to federal data to better contend with expected climate impacts.