In the latest Scientific American (Dec 2011), there is an article "After the Deluge" about what some local governments are doing to alleviate the effects of climate change. Individually they can't do much to correct the problem, but they are looking at taking care of the dramatic swings in weather created by climate change. In many cases it is just looking at flood control procedures but at least they are doing something. Basically they are seeing that they are having things like 500 year floods or 100 year droughts every few years. Some coastal communities are working on developing natural structures that will help mitigate flooding from rising sea levels.
Of course a lot of places aren't doing anything, just going on as always. But the article does point out that local action can at least help mitigate the problems and since congress, here in the US, isn't doing anything this is the best we have so far.
Just for the record here in Tulsa, Oklahoma the community has been working for 25 years on flood mitigation. East Tulsa for a long time had had flood problems. Then in 1984 they had 13 inches of rain and massive flooding, mostly along Mingo Creek. That was when some citizens stood up and said that something had to be done. A huge effort was started and they bought out whole blocks of houses, straightened and smoothed creek beds, and built a lot of flood retention areas to hold run off until the creeks had gone down. Now the rates for flood insurance in Tulsa are the lowest that are available. This wasn't done because of climate change, but it shows that a lot can be done by the local area government, if they can get their act together. It took time, in fact it still isn't completely done, but they are still working on it.
Bill Gill
