So let's jump in, let start planning. So before we start planning, let's think about what we mean when we're talking about, Adaptation Plans, and what it means to plan an Adaptation Action. So adaptation plans are these general, broad scoped documents that are often times very formal. So an example, would be PlaNYC, that is a very large document and plan, that Mayor Bloomberg called for following Hurricane Sandy, to get the city, and its constituents, and various departments thinking about climate change and the impacts that it might have on a variety of sectors. A document like that required, a lot of input and a lot of different constituents to talk about or provide insight into what they're interested in, and what needs to be happening in their particular jurisdictions. So that's a very formal document. Often times, they vary in temporal scale, and they vary in spatial scale, so you might have one for a city like PlaNYC. You might have one for a state, you might have one for a country, and there are some. What these documents do, is they don't necessarily get into the details of what the activity is, they imply the adaptation actions. So for the rest of this course, when we talk about adaptation actions, I'm referring to these very explicit activities and ultimately as you'll be doing this week, the adaptation plans. Those are documents that plan for a very specific activity. They could be derived from larger adaptation plans, but they are not necessarily an adaptation plan because they are much more specific to a particular action. So in the Planning Phase, am just going to give a brief overview of what our various cycle or phases are in the life cycle. So in the planning phase, you're identifying what needs to happen in order to implement and to evaluate your adaptation action and you're assembling all the materials and resources that you need. The main components of the planning phase are understanding your scale and your scope, the theory, the justification behind the climate and health relationship that you're interested in, some data and evidence that provides some context for that relationship, your stakeholder engagement, reporting out on your findings, and then your evaluation plan. The implementation phase is short, in terms of describing it, it's this is just where the work is being done, or where the plan is going to be actually deployed. So I like to think of it as, "where the rubber hits the road" and you're primarily focusing in this section on the activities and the project management tools. So how are you going to collect your data? How are you going to evaluate your data? These are all very important pieces that should be planned ahead of time, and that's where the implementation phase comes into place for this adaptation action planning. The improvement phase, is that last phase where really, we're utilizing the evaluation data, so that we can modify our implementation as it unfolds. So you would use this phase to then update your adaptation action based on what you found, and thus all of the relevant documents and sections related to it. So the main components of your improvement phase are going to be determining your recommendations, and discussing how you're going to disseminate them. A key piece of this, is translating your evaluation findings. So will you come up with presentations that you are going to share one pagers, and then lastly, you might end up deciding on creating a plan for change. So perhaps a new adaptation action that you would then move forward in planning. Again, the Adaptation Action Lifecycles, comprise of three iterative phases; Planning, Implementation, and Improvement. In this course, we're going to focus on some key foundations parts to planning phase, which includes the rationales, stakeholder engagement, and implementation design. While the other phases I just reviewed are also necessary steps, they are outside the scope of this introductory course. So in the next section, we'll look specifically at these planning phase elements.
