The Climate Adaptation Plan Act of 2025 (CAP Act of 2025) would require the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to establish a competitive grant program within one year of enactment to help eligible entities develop climate adaptation plans. The program emphasizes environmental justice, requiring guidance and applications to consider low-income communities and EJ communities, and to engage a broad set of stakeholders, including youth, farmers, Indigenous communities, NGOs, labor, business, and local governments. Eligible entities—primarily local governments and certain tribal organizations—could receive funds to create adaptation plans that assess climate risks to communities, ecosystems, housing, and infrastructure, and to outline concrete actions such as land-use changes and restoration efforts. The bill also calls for integrating these plans with other local planning efforts and prioritizes applications that include environmental justice communities, while removing any requirement for grant matching. In defining terms and implementation details, the bill envisions a plan framework that measures and tracks greenhouse gas emissions while also adopting climate adaptation measures. Eligible entities would need to provide demographic and economic data, explain why they are pursuing a climate adaptation plan, describe risk exposure and proposed stakeholder engagement, identify a project lead, and indicate whether a third party will facilitate the process. The program would aim to align adaptation planning with existing plans like hazard mitigation, land-use, and emergency management plans, and would require plans to address risks across population, ecosystems, and infrastructure with explicit actions to mitigate those risks.
Key Points
- 1Establishment of a Climate Adaptation Plan grant program at the EPA, to distribute funds competitively to eligible entities within one year of enactment.
- 2Strong emphasis on environmental justice, including priority for applications that include EJ communities and require stakeholder engagement across diverse groups.
- 3Comprehensive application requirements, including demographic data, risk assessments for climate impacts, program/finance experience, and clear plans for stakeholder engagement and project leadership.
- 4Integration with existing planning efforts (hazard mitigation, land use, economic development, capital improvement, emergency management, etc.) and requirement that the climate adaptation plan address risks to people, ecosystems, housing, and infrastructure.
- 5No matching funds required; clear definitions for key terms (climate adaptation plan, eligible entity, environmental justice community, low-income community, etc.) and broad definitions of eligible entities (local governments and certain tribal entities).