South Central Texas — home to five million people today and projected to reach eight million within two decades — faces intensifying risks from flash flooding, extreme heat, and wildfires. This region experienced 20 of the nation’s 27 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2024. Resilience efforts exist, but they remain fragmented, underfunded, and increasingly outpaced by the scale and frequency of disasters.

The Climate Resilient Communities Accelerator, led by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES), is designed to change that by convening more than 60 cross-sector leaders around shared risks and coordinated solutions.

Over two years, the Accelerator will bring together public agencies, businesses, community organizations, and academic partners through a structured series of convenings, research, and co-creation sessions. The central deliverable is a Regional Action Roadmap: a shared, multi-hazard plan developed by the cohort itself, with strategies and implementation commitments across wildfire, extreme heat, and flooding. Direct honoraria payments and formal partnerships will support meaningful participation from at least six community-based organizations, ensuring that under-resourced communities help shape priorities rather than receive them after the fact.

The goal is concrete early action: new public-private partnerships delivering visible resilience investments, upgraded critical infrastructure, and local organizations co-leading roadmap implementation. Participants will also join a growing national network connecting Accelerator regions in Colorado and Washington, feeding locally grounded experience into federal resilience policy.

The combination of rapid population growth, high disaster exposure, and fragmented response capacity makes South Central Texas a region where coordinated pre-disaster investment is both urgently needed and likely to demonstrate replicable results.