The Maritime Aquarium at Norwalk is located at the mouth of the Norwalk River where it flows into Long Island Sound. Its mission is to inspire people to appreciate and protect the Sound and the global environment. Over the past decade, a large percentage of the region’s 23 million people living within 50 miles of the Sound were directly affected by severe weather events, providing a timely opportunity to educate students, teachers and the public about community resilience. In a three-year program, the Maritime Aquarium will deliver education related to environmental hazards, resilience, and the underlying science to schools from ten towns along or near Connecticut’s coast, including eight in the Natural Hazards Mitigation Plan Draft 2016-2021 for Southwestern Connecticut. In these towns as in many coastal regions, the most significant environmental threats are related to the nexus of land and water. To reflect that nexus, education will occur both in the classroom and on the water, aboard the Aquarium’s hybrid-electric research vessel, Spirit of the Sound. An exhibit featuring NOAA assets related to threats and resilience will also build environmental literacy as it engages Aquarium visitors. The project will be supported by an advisory board of local educators, planning and emergency management officials, representatives from Connecticut Sea Grant, the Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaptation and the Western Connecticut Council of Governments.

The Wild Center’s Convening Young Leaders for Climate Resilience in New York State project will increase climate literacy among high school students and teachers in New York City, the Catskills and the Adirondacks and give students the leadership skills to help their communities respond to the impacts of climate change. Working with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Delaware County, the Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School in Brooklyn, and the Alliance for Climate Education, along with NOAA, the New York State Office of Climate Change and NYSERDA, the project comes at a time when the impacts of climate change loom larger than ever. But today’s youth – the generation most likely to mitigate its impacts – have had little exposure to the issue: Just 25 percent of American teens demonstrate a basic understanding of it. Project partners will incorporate state, regional and local planning in their efforts, which will establish Youth Climate Summits and Youth Climate Leadership Practicums in the three project regions; build on educators’ interests through a Teacher Climate Institute; and communicate climate change science and resilience through community outreach activities. By the conclusion of the project, we expect to work directly with more than 600 students and 200 teachers, each of whom will gain a better understanding of the impacts of climate change in New York State, a greater capacity to make informed decisions about the threats to their own regions, and a stronger connection with other community members and ongoing resiliency work. In addition, the project will also create replicable tools, video documentation for local outreach, and training approaches for youth leadership and teachers regardless of their location.