A notice of funding opportunity released last week for the 2025 Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Climate Resilience Fund expanded on a matching funds program in response to uncertainty over federal funding programs.
“With climate change accelerating and traditional federal financial support uncertain, it’s more important than ever to help municipalities access every possible option for matching funds for resilience projects,” said DEEP Commissioner Katie Dykes in a press release.
The uncertainty over traditional federal financial support was felt by Connecticut recently when twelve state energy projects, amounting to $52.9 million dollars of federal support, were terminated at the beginning of this month, according to Connecticut Insider.
The Connecticut Community Climate Resilience Program was established by Gov. Ned Lamont in 2021 by Executive Order 21-3. The DEEP Climate Resilience Fund (DCRF) gave its first awards two years after its establishment with $8.8 million going towards 17 municipalities climate resilience plans and projects in 2023.
The expansion of the DCRF includes a new category, named the deployment category, which uses multiple state and federal funding pools for the construction of energy resilience infrastructure, according to the fund’s notice.
A federal grant awarded to the UConn Eversource Energy Center for a project advancing community energy resilience was among the energy projects cancelled by the Trump administration this month. The project, named PROACTIVE, uses AI to forecast storm damage and storage of extra solar energy to prevent power disruptions, according to the Eversource Energy Center website.
The principal investigator of PROACTIVE, Junbo Zhao, has not responded to a request for comment yet.
The deputy commissioner at the Connecticut Division of Emergency Management and Homeland Security, Brenda Bergeron, said that the new approach to funding for climate resiliency could help some of these challenged projects in a press release.
“We look forward to encouraging communities who need matching funds for federal grants to apply to DEEP’s new matching funds program, which will help communities better navigate the uncertainty in the federal funding landscape and successfully compete for funding,” Bergeron said in the press release.
The fund was previously separated into two categories, called planning and advancement.
Planning supports municipalities and neighborhoods to develop a plan addressing risks and vulnerabilities associated with climate-related hazards. The current plan proposes $150,000 to $250,000 to be awarded towards a project in this category, according to a public meeting.
The advancement category supports previously identified climate resilience projects in developing competitive grant applications with a proposed funding range for this category being $200,000 to $650,000.
The executive order which established the DCRF required that at least 40% of resources go to municipalities where vulnerable communities, like environmental justice and economically distressed communities, reside. DEEP said that during the first round of DCRF in 2023, 93% of overall awards went to vulnerable communities.
The notice of funding opportunity for the DCRF said vulnerable communities were “any community that has been, or is expected to be, disproportionately impacted by natural hazards.”
Environmental justice communities are separately defined by the Connecticut General Statute section 22a-20a as groups in the most recent U.S. Census Bureau “for which thirty per cent or more of the population consists of low income persons who are not institutionalized and have an income below two hundred per cent of the federal poverty level.”
Co-founder of the Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed, Maggie Favretti, said she was concerned over the exclusion of the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation from the environmental justice communities list.
In a public comment at a DCRF meeting, Favretti said that the challenges faced by the tribal nation not being considered an environmental justice community coincides with DEEP not considering the Eastern Pequot water bodies in recent surveys with the Environmental Protection Agency.
The director for the Office of Planning and Resilience at DEEP, Christopher Field, said in an email that more information like appropriate social, economic and environmental data, should be provided in DCRF applications when a community feels excluded from the list of vulnerable or environmental justice communities.
Favretti said that the challenges faced by the tribal nation not being considered an environmental justice community coincides with DEEP not considering the Eastern Pequot water bodies in recent surveys with the Environmental Protection Agency. “The Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation is on a body of water that CT DEEP and EPA did not test in their last rounds of the integrated water study,” Favretti said. “What do we do about that?”
Favretti said that the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation could use help from the DCRF for their community center which helps with climate resilience as cooling infrastructure but would need an off the grid approach contrary to the current DCRF partnership with Eversource.
Field said that no partnership exists with Eversource or any other utilities for the funding categories in the DCRF.
“Off-the-grid approaches, such as ‘microgrids’ or solar-plus-storage solutions, are central to DCRF funding,” Field said. “Off-the-grid approaches to energy resilience, depending on the configuration, would be eligible under any of the funding categories released in the current Notice of Funding Opportunity.”
Questions about the 2025 DEEP Climate Resilience Fund can be raised during office hours held by DEEP from 2 to 3 p.m. this Thursday. The deadline for written comments on the request for proposals draft must be submitted to DEEP.EnergyBureau@ct.gov by Oct. 21, 2025.
This article was updated on Oct. 16 to include additional information from an email with Christopher Fields, director of the Office of Planning and Resilience at DEEP.