The New England Aquarium will work with the Metropolitan Area Planning Council to establish Community Partnerships for Resilience (CPR), which will create community partnerships in three Boston-area communities that face severe risk from a changing climate – Chelsea, Hull, and Lynn, Massachusetts. CPR will facilitate ‘Community Teams’ of local professionals with diverse and relevant expertise in climate science, engineering, community planning and community action, and representatives from local schools or school-based educational programs serving youth in grades 4 through 8. Each team will identify the most critical, climate-related issues for their area that would benefit from public involvement and understanding. Then they will inform the design of learning activities and youth-focused climate resilience toolkits; serve as resources for teachers and students; and facilitate student-led projects to engage parents, peers, and other community members. Students themselves represent a key constituency – they will be most directly impacted by future changes and they will need civic capacity to foster positive change. Project evaluation will assess student learning and indicators of community engagement to provide both formative feedback and summative assessment of the project impacts.

The American Meteorological Society (AMS) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) work together to share knowledge and information about weather and climate, ocean, and coasts with educators and students across the country. The goal of this effort is to build a scientifically informed and engaged society and a diverse STEM workforce prepared to respond to environmental hazards. AMS facilitates a national offering of the DataStreme Atmosphere and DataStreme Ocean courses and supports Project ATMOSPHERE leadership training workshops at the National Weather Service Training Center for in-service K-12 educators, with focus on those at schools with considerable numbers of students underrepresented in STEM. By 2023, about 2,100 educators will earn graduate credits through a partnership with California University of Pennsylvania and become confident Earth science educators. These educators are expected to impact more than 20,000 additional educators and several hundred thousand K-12 students.