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Arizonans face environmental hazards from extreme heat, drought, and flooding. Watershed Management Group and partner Arizona Project WET’s “Recharge the Rain” project addressed these threats by building environmental literacy among 4-12th grade teachers, students, and the public. The project centered on educator professional training and hands-on water harvesting skills. Participants moved through a continuum from awareness to knowledge gain, to conceptual understanding, and ultimately to action. Utilizing data and experts from NOAA assets, we strengthened the capacity of residents to be resilient to our local climate threats. This 4.5 year project 1) developed and immersed 14,452 students in STEAM curriculum incorporating water harvesting that increases understanding of earth systems, engineering design, and weather; 2) applied systems thinking to train 52 teachers and 191 community volunteers in water harvesting practices and citizen-science data collection; 3) involved 8,289 Tucson community members in water harvesting principles; 4) implemented 21 teacher/student-led water harvesting projects at schools; and 5) celebrated our community work with student artwork. RtR became a call for action and an inspiration for change and adaptation to extreme weather conditions in the urban environments of the Sonoran Desert putting Tucson at the core of understanding climate, adaptation, and community.

Brooklyn College and the National Wildlife Federation Eco-Schools USA program in New York City created The Resilient Schools Consortium (RiSC) Program to increase the environmental literacy of middle school and high school students while providing opportunities for their voices to be heard. The City's long-term planning document, OneNYC, set forth a vision for a resilient city without specifying a role for students or including specific plans for their schools. This project addressed this gap by allowing students to interact with city, state and federal officials and resilience practitioners and present their ideas for resilience guidelines for NYC Public Schools. An active-learning RiSC Curriculum was developed by two middle school teachers in collaboration with their peers and the project team. The curriculum is available at https://riscnyc.org. RiSC teams at six middle schools and high schools used the curriculum to follow the UC Climate Resilience Toolkit’s Steps to Resilience. They learned about climate change and extreme weather, the vulnerability of their schools and their communities, options for addressing the risks, planned, and prioritized action, and executed small scale resilience projects on their school grounds when possible. Students were able to share what they had learned and have dialogue with professionals from government agencies and non-governmental about actions and solutions at two RiSC summits in June 2018 and June 2019. The RiSC program directly reached over 200 NYC public schools students through direct participation on the RiSC teams or RiSC-sponsored events, and indirectly reached hundreds more through the interaction of RiSC students with their peers. RiSC students were highly motivated by the program’s focus on action and the opportunity to speak directly to officials at the summits. The RiSC program also resulted in the creation of the New York City Climate and Resilience Education Taskforce (https://cretf.org), a group of NYC agencies, educators, and non-governmental organizations that are working towards providing climate and resilience education for all New York City students and their teachers. Key contributors to the success of the Resilient Schools Consortium program included New York Sea Grant and the Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay.

Under leadership from the University of the Virgin Islands, the Virgin Islands Marine Advisory Service, and local, non-profit, long-term, 2017 storm recovery groups, this 5-year project will create the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) Storm Strong Program. To date, minimal efforts have been made to engage the USVI community in hurricane education and preparation. As a result, USVI communities face significant, but often preventable, storm risks. This is the Territory’s first sustained, community-based, hurricane hazard preparedness, and community leadership building program. The USVI Storm Strong Program will engage underserved and underrepresented middle- and high-school youth and their families on all of the Territory’s main islands - St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix - in a program modelled after the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit framework. Youth and their families will: (1) explore the science and hazards associated with hurricanes, (2) assess their communities’ vulnerabilities and associated risks, (3) evaluate personal and community assets and options to increase resilience, (4) prioritize and plan for events occurring before, during, and after a storm, and (5) take action, in this case, through Community Transfer Projects, which will turn the information gained through the Program into local actions to increase individual and community resilience, sharing knowledge and actions with the broader USVI community and beyond. Through this training, ~400 USVI youth and their families will be empowered as environmental leaders and change agents within their communities and important insights will be learned as to how best to engage underrepresented and underserved groups in hazard preparedness. Creation of the USVI Storm Strong Program is timely, given the significant impacts resulting from Hurricanes Irma and Maria, two Category 5 hurricanes that devastated the USVI in September 2017. These storms provide a window of opportunity to bring together partners from federal, territorial, non-governmental, academic, and the private sector, to develop a strategic, cohesive, long-term, high-impact, community-based program to improve environmental literacy and extreme weather hazard preparedness in the Territory, goals that align with the mission of NOAA’s Office of Education.

Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College in partnership with the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, 1854 Treaty Authority, University of Wisconsin Extension’s G-WOW program, and Lake Superior Estuarine Research Reserve are proud to provide the Climate Strong-Building Tribal Youth Leadership for Climate Resiliency program. Our three-year project aims to increase the knowledge and readiness of middle to high school students to deal with the impacts of extreme weather and environmental hazards that face the Ojibwe Ceded Territories (Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan) and build capacity for increased climate change community resiliency curriculum in the classroom. Climate change impacts everyone, but for indigenous peoples it threatens culturally significant traditions, such as wild rice harvesting, that relies on sustainable fish, plant, and wildlife resources. These resources are critical for subsistence, spiritual and cultural needs, and treaty rights. Culturally relevant, place-based education is an important tool to involve students, in particular, underrepresented students, in developing critical thinking skills to assess the issue of community resiliency to extreme weather events and engaging in action to help resolve it. In order to achieve our objectives, we will aim our educational efforts toward youth first, as well as reaching the communities we serve. Each year, six residential youth camps (18 total) will be hosted within the Ojibwe Ceded Territories. Each three-day camp will be focused on investigating issues of community resiliency, adaption, and mitigation associated with increasing extreme weather events as well as natural environmental hazards. Camps will use place-based, experiential lessons to teach resiliency issues demonstrated by climate change effects on Ojibwe culturally important natural resources. Our project will train formal and informal educators throughout the Ojibwe Ceded Territories on how to use indigenous climate curriculum using tribal traditional ecological knowledge and NOAA assets to investigate community climate resiliency issues. Using both teacher “train the trainer” workshops and our camps, this project will create a network of formal K-12 and informal educators trained to become leaders in providing culturally relevant climate resiliency outreach to students. We will increase community resiliency literacy through six community outreach events each year (18 total) that will highlight resiliency issues facing our region and the research being done on landscape and ecological vulnerabilities through NOAA and tribal assets. Our goals are increased community resiliency literacy and adaptation of stewardship behaviors that reduce climate change impacts and increases adaption and mitigation behaviors by our participants. These behaviors will help increase stewardship practices reducing extreme weather impacts affecting the sustainability of culturally relevant resources, thereby preserving important cultural, spiritual, subsistence, and treaty rights practices.