Our Regional Work
Featured Cases:
Regional Collaborative Processes with CBI
Regional processes involve careful navigation of diverse jurisdictions and communities, working across boundaries and sectors—between municipalities, counties, and states. CBI has decades of experience helping stakeholders work across regions to tackle complex challenges. We seek collaborative solutions within a range of subjects and fields, such as water management, energy siting, land use and transportation, and more. Our services include:
• Facilitation and mediation
• Citizen engagement
• Skill-building training
• Strategic planning
Read about examples of these services below.
Coordinating between Water Basins
In the Northern Sacramento Valley, groundwater subbasins are often hydrologically connected—pumping in one basin could affect flows to other basins, all while water resources are confronted by, among other challenges, climate change. With this complexity in mind, CBI organized Northern Sacramento Valley’s Interbasin Coordination effort in 2021, bringing together participants including representatives of 13 different subbasins in the valley.
The result: Participants developed a framework to coordinate shared management of their interconnected water supply. Guidelines were put in place for future dispute resolution among different regions.
Water Resilience for a High Plains Aquifer
The Ogallala Aquifer supplies water across the High Plains, from South Dakota to Texas, making it essential for the national and global food supplies. With water storage declining, CBI has been supporting a multi-state collaborative led by the Irrigation Innovation Consortium and NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System, working to address this increasing groundwater crisis through collective learning and action.
The result: For the 2024 Ogallala Aquifer Summit in Liberal, Kansas, CBI worked to bring together climate and water planners, scientists, academics, crop and livestock producers to share data and explore sustainable practices.
Compensation For Fisheries Affected by Offshore Wind
CBI, in partnership with the Special Initiative on Offshore Wind, 11 states, commercial fishing industry advisors, and offshore wind developers, worked for over three years to create a regional fund administrator to design a compensatory mitigation program for fisheries impacted by offshore wind energy development.
The result: The collaborative process led to the selection of BrownGreer and Carbon Trust as the fund administration designer along with the members of the two advisory and oversight committees to guide the final program design.
Developing a Vision for a Massachusetts Watershed
Greater Boston’s Lower Mystic River watershed faces significant challenges from rising sea levels, increased flooding risks, and tensions between competing land uses. To take on these challenges, CBI led an engagement process to develop a Waterfront Vision for the Lower Mystic with six separate municipalities. The team created an outreach process that included: surveys in Spanish, English, and Chinese; a community gathering with hundreds of participants; and the development and use of hands-on tools for open space design.
The result: Hundreds of residents used a hands-on kit for illustrating possible park designs, shared objectives were established by the watershed’s municipalities, and a final vision was publicly shared.