How to Write an RFP for a Climate Adaptation Plan

Florida funded 45 local adaptation plans in its last two grant cycles at a median of $250,000, and its 2026 guidebook spends its final chapter on implementation: funding, schedules, capital budgets and monitoring. That emphasis is right. Plans stall after adoption when nobody owns the actions and nothing is priced.

A climate adaptation plan turns a vulnerability assessment into a prioritized program of projects, policies and operating changes, with owners, planning-level costs, funding sources and triggers for when to act. You need one once you know what is at risk and must decide what to do first. The RFP succeeds when it requires an implementation schedule tied to your capital budget.

Money for the plan itself is thinner than it was: California cancelled Round 2 of its Adaptation Planning Grant, and FEMA’s latest BRIC round dropped planning.

What this work should deliver

The outcome is a short list of actions the organization will actually take in the next five to ten years, a longer list staged for later, and the decision points that move actions from one list to the other. Everything in the plan should trace back to a risk the vulnerability assessment ranked. Our climate resilience planning hub collects related guidance.

Who this is for: cities, counties, regional agencies and tribes planning across a community, and ports and utilities planning for their own assets. It is the wrong purchase if you have no current assessment of what is at risk; buy that first, using our vulnerability assessment RFP guide. It also cannot stand in for a FEMA-approved mitigation plan, which has its own update process.

Ask for the full range of responses. Florida’s guidebook sorts strategies into protection, accommodation, avoidance and adaptation, and it gives nature-based solutions their own section. A plan that offers only seawalls and pumps has skipped the hard conversations, including managed retreat where it applies.

Draw one boundary clearly: operations. Many of the cheapest adaptations are changes in maintenance schedules, design standards and permitting rules. Say whether those are in scope, because they don’t show up in a capital plan and are easy to leave out.

Rules and standards to cite

The binding requirements for local adaptation plans come from state law and funders, so cite those first, then a method standard any qualified firm can meet.

• California. Government Code section 65302(g)(4) requires the safety element to carry a vulnerability assessment, adaptation goals and policies, and feasible implementation measures. Those measures include avoiding climate impacts from new land uses, siting new essential public facilities outside at-risk areas where feasible, and identifying natural infrastructure. A hazard mitigation or adaptation plan can satisfy the section if the city shows how each requirement is met.
• Florida. Section 380.093 funds adaptation plans that help local governments prioritize projects “in a manner consistent with departmental guidance,” and DEP wrote its February 2026 guidebook for exactly those grants. The guidebook also covers the Peril of Flood rules for coastal communities’ local plans and optional Adaptation Action Areas, which let a community apply higher standards in low-lying coastal flood zones.
• Method. ISO 14090:2019 sets principles, requirements and guidelines for adaptation, and ISO’s committee maintains a companion standard for local government planning, covered in our ISO 14092 guide. The federal Climate Resilience Toolkit’s Steps to Resilience name the same arc: investigate options, prioritize and plan, take action.
• FEMA. The HMA guide expects mitigation activities it funds to be consistent with the jurisdiction’s mitigation plan, and subapplications document that conformance. FEMA’s 2025 planning policy no longer asks those plans to address climate change, so the adaptation plan is often where future conditions get handled.

The FEMA point is the one buyers miss. An adaptation project that isn’t in your hazard mitigation plan waits for a plan update before it can compete for FEMA money, so build the crosswalk into the scope.

Sample scope of work

Adapt the bracketed items. The tasks move from risk to choices to commitments.

1. Build on the assessment. Don’t pay twice for analysis you own.

The Consultant shall review the [Year] vulnerability assessment, identify gaps that would change priorities, and fill only those gaps. The Consultant shall confirm the scenarios, planning horizons and ranked risks the plan will address, and the [Agency] shall approve them before strategy work begins.

2. Goals, risk tolerance and triggers. Make the plan say when it will act, not only what it will do.

The Consultant shall facilitate adoption of adaptation goals and risk tolerance statements for [flooding, heat and other priority hazards], and shall define measurable triggers, such as annual tidal flood days or a disaster declaration, that will move a staged action into implementation.

3. Strategy options and screening. Florida’s guidebook recommends STAPLEE for a first pass.

The Consultant shall develop a long list of protection, accommodation, avoidance and adaptation strategies, including nature-based and policy options, for each priority risk, and screen them for social, technical, administrative, political, legal, economic and environmental feasibility, documenting why each was advanced or set aside.

4. Prioritization. Price what you keep, and show who benefits; see our note on equitable climate adaptation.

For each advanced strategy, the Consultant shall prepare a planning-level cost estimate including operations and maintenance, a benefit estimate using [FEMA benefit-cost methods or another named method], co-benefits, and who benefits by location and population, and shall rank the strategies using criteria approved by the [Agency].

5. Implementation and funding.

The Consultant shall prepare an implementation schedule naming the responsible department, phase, planning-level cost, candidate funding sources by program name and the capital plan year for each priority action, and shall identify at least [three] priority projects to advance to concept design for funding applications.

6. Engagement. Fund community partners directly where you can; Ventura County’s 2026 transportation plan set aside about $40,000 of its grant for a community foundation to run outreach.

The Consultant shall design and support engagement at three decision points (goals, strategy screening and priorities) with [named community partners], provide materials in [languages], and document how input changed the plan.

7. Integration, monitoring and adoption.

The Consultant shall deliver a crosswalk showing where plan actions belong in the [hazard mitigation plan, general or land use plan and capital improvement program], a monitoring framework with indicators and a review schedule, and adoption materials for [governing bodies].

Deliverables to require

• Gap review of the existing vulnerability assessment, with the approved list of risks to address.
• Adopted goals, risk tolerance statements and implementation triggers.
• Strategy long list with the STAPLEE screen and reasons for each decision.
• Priority action table: owner, phase, planning-level capital and operating cost, benefits, funding sources by program name, capital plan year.
• Concept designs and cost estimates for the top [three] projects, packaged for funding applications.
• Distribution analysis showing who benefits from each priority action, by neighborhood.
• Crosswalk to the hazard mitigation plan and to the general or land use plan.
• Monitoring and evaluation framework with indicators, responsible staff and a review schedule.
• Engagement record and a plain-language summary.
• Editable files for every table, map and model, with rights to reuse them.

How to evaluate proposals

Ask finalists for one past plan and the list of its actions that have since been funded. The ratio tells you more than any narrative. If federal money pays for the contract, 2 CFR 200.320 requires the RFP to publish every evaluation factor and its relative importance and to weigh price with other factors.

Resist scoring polish. A beautifully designed plan with no owners is still a shelf document; weight implementation and funding at least as heavily as the strategy work.

Timeline

Florida’s guidebook calls for schedules that stay flexible as hazard events and sea level rise rates change, and it suggests pre-planning post-disaster policy changes so that a disaster itself becomes a trigger. Put both ideas in the scope; they keep a plan current between formal updates. Frederick County’s combined plan, adopted in 2022, runs on the five-year mitigation plan cycle, and our county profile shows the hazards behind it.

Budget and cost drivers

Florida’s award lists are the clearest public benchmark. Across the 2024-25 and 2025-26 cycles, 45 adaptation plan awards had a median of $250,000, a middle half from $127,500 to $300,000, and a range from $50,000 to $435,000. The 16 awards that paired a plan with a new or updated vulnerability assessment had a median of $324,750, topped by a $700,000 multi-jurisdictional update in Monroe County.

California’s Round 1 grants accepted requests from $150,000 to $650,000, from an $8 million pool, and called for at least one co-applicant. Check the funding calendar before you commit: Florida’s program took no planning applications in its 2026 cycle, and our resilience funding hub tracks what is open.

What moves the price:

• Starting point. A current, compliant vulnerability assessment saves money: Florida’s bundled awards ran about $75,000 above plan-only awards at the median.
• Number of priority risks and places. Each district or watershed with its own strategies adds analysis and engagement.
• Depth of costing. Concept designs and benefit-cost analysis for top projects cost more and pay back in funding applications.
• Jurisdictions. Joint plans, like the Oakland Park and Wilton Manors plan Florida funded at $275,000, add coordination and adoption steps.
• Engagement model. Paying community partners directly adds a line item and usually improves attendance and trust.
• Integration work. Crosswalks to the mitigation plan and land use plan add hours and save a later amendment.

Red flags in proposals

• A strategy menu copied across clients, with no link to your ranked risks.
• No operating and maintenance costs, especially for nature-based projects that need years of care.
• Every action rated high priority, which means none are.
• Funding sources listed as ‘grants’ or ‘federal,’ with no program names or match requirements.
• No triggers or staging, so the plan assumes everything happens at once.
• Engagement limited to reacting to a finished draft.
• No plan to carry actions into the hazard mitigation plan, which blocks FEMA eligibility later.

How we’d approach it

We would start with the capital plan and the funding calendar, then fit the strategy work to them. In our work with the Resilience Authority of Annapolis and Anne Arundel County on the Annapolis Maritime Resilience Initiative, 10 priority sites advanced to preliminary concept design, each with a planning-level cost estimate, anticipated benefits and an implementation roadmap, which gave partners a clear path to pursue funding. We also built Resilient & Ready through Council Fire Labs with the Resilience Authority to rank projects and match them to funding, so the priority list stays current after the plan is adopted.