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The Public Libraries Advancing Community Engagement (PLACE) project was built on the idea that librarians can play a significant role in increasing a community's climate resiliency — the ability to recover quickly from or plan for and anticipate weather impacts. PLACE paired about 50 librarians in rural and under-resourced urban communities across the U.S. with local NOAA/NWS scientists to engage over 1,500 youth and adults in a series of public library programs tailored to the local geography. The programs used popular books and human-interest videos to stimulate discussion and critical thinking about resilient responses to environmental changes and extreme weather events, as well as introducing relevant NOAA tools and resources for data access and resiliency planning. For both audience members and librarians, PLACE enhanced environmental literacy specific to their own region’s geography, vulnerabilities, and threats, toward the longer-term goal of helping them to build local resilience.

Of all weather-related disasters, heat waves cause the most deaths every year in the United States and climate change is already increasing their frequency, duration, and intensity. In urban areas, heat exposure and risk are highly related to the built environment and the everyday lived experiences of urban residents. Building heat resilience—the capacity for communities to adapt to and cope with higher temperatures and heat waves—therefore necessitates a comprehensive and place-based approach that includes education about the factors affecting risk and vulnerability, consequences of heat on health and livability, as well as potential long-term and short-term actions that residents can take to reduce risk and vulnerability. In this project, we will promote environmental literacy and strengthen climate resilience in Southwest Virginia by building a cross-sector urban heat resilience environmental literacy network that includes: the public education system, students and families, community health professionals, and City government. The project is led by Carilion Clinic in partnership with Virginia Tech, Virginia Clinicians for Climate Action, and Roanoke City Government. Through these partnerships, we will build resilience pathways for dealing with long-term higher temperatures and emergency heatwaves using combined urban planning and public health approaches. We will extend and expand Virginia Tech’s previous engagement with Roanoke youth (2-week summer STEM and Heat Resilience summer school program for middle school students) to involve the community more broadly to co-produce neighborhood-specific heat mitigation plans that address resident concerns in Roanoke and improve environmental literacy around the problem of urban heat as both an acute and chronic issue. We will work with teachers and administrators in the Roanoke City Public School system to institutionalize the STEM/urban planning-based curriculum we develop so that more children can benefit from it. Using youth education as an entry to engage the broader community, we will also host a family-based STEM-Urban Planning Family Summit, which will inform residents about urban planning processes and how changes to urban landscapes can make neighborhoods cooler, more comfortable, and more resilient to rising temperatures. We will also build capacity among health professionals and integrate them into community planning by: educating and enlisting the support of health professionals and Carilion’s community outreach network to work with community groups and families; engaging three Carilion clinicians to participate in an eight-hour educational training to learn more about impacts of climate and health in the region and provide tools for educating other clinicians and community; and training Carilion’s 37 Community Health Educators and Community Health Workers and developing community education/outreach materials on climate change impacts on health with a focus on heat illness. The urban planning and public health components to increasing heat resilience will come together in a culminating Heat Resilience Fair, at which participants in our program (students, families, residents, clinicians, health workers, and City government officials) will present ideas and solicit feedback from the broader community. The solicited ideas will be incorporated into the City’s planning processes, enabling formalization of long-term goals for public health and the built environment with respect to rising temperatures.

The Earth System Science Education Alliance (ESSEA) is a successful teacher professional development program enhancing K-12 teachers' environmental literacy and ability to teach Earth System Science. The ESSEA 40+ educational institution consortium is supporting universities and other educational institutions in teacher preparation and professional development for pre-service and in-service K-12 teachers. This NOAA-funded project enhances and builds on this foundation by: 1) Using the ESSEA online courses as a model to introduce newly upgraded Earth system science undergraduate and graduate courses for teachers; 2) Introducing new Earth System Science data, analysis tools and educational resources to support the teacher courses; and 3) Disseminating model teaching practices and program success through annual conferences, continuing support, and presentations at geoscience and education conferences.

The Orlando Science Center has assembled a project team to create a unique environmental science learning tool: THE GLOBAL DECISION ROOM. Founded on, and enhancing, the Science On a Sphere (SOS) digital globe, the Global Decision Room is an interactive theatre that puts visitors in the role of being decision makers on behalf of the behavior of large populations on the planet. The results of global decisions relating to the environment are seen played out on SOS. The interactive strategy that is created for the Global Decision Room will be flexible and well integrated into the SOS software platform, making it possible to design other educational story scenarios that can use the same system. The Global Decision Room is designed as a multi-use, high impact, exciting content delivery platform. This proposal is based on a well developed initial educational premise, but the resulting construction of the Global Decision Room will be the perfect environment for other educational topics of interest to NOAA's outreach strategy. As new datasets become available in the future, new interactive stories will be developed for the Global Decision Room. The Orlando project brings with it significant additional funding from the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Orlando Utilities Commission, and the Florida Hydrogen Initiative, which will greatly leverage the funding from NOAA. Partners in the project include a strong technical team from the University of Central Florida and the Florida Solar Energy Center, interactive digital media experts from the Institute for Simulation and Training, the creative design team "i.d.e.a.s." located at Disney-MGM Studios, and the XhibitNet interactive multimedia design team.

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.

Communities in Colorado are increasingly experiencing major disruptions from environmental hazards, such as wildfire, flood, and drought. With this rise in hazardous events, there is a pressing need for communities to increase their resilience. An interdisciplinary team from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) Education & Outreach Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder has developed and implemented an innovative, action-oriented youth engagement project that targets rural Colorado students, teachers, and communities. Our engagement model 15 empowers youth i) to envision community resilience through immersive scenario-based role play based using a solid understanding of the relevant science, ii) to learn about natural hazards through engaging place-based lessons, iii) to initiate conversations about hazard preparedness from within communities, and iv) to develop and implement student-led resilience action projects and participate in community resilience expos. A needs assessment disseminated to Colorado teachers guided the project team in the development of all instructional materials and allowed for customizing the content to teacher needs. The project team developed three units (one of wildfire, flood, and drought) for middle and high school students that consist of three parts: place-based data-focused lessons to introduce the hazard, a scenario-based role-play game with a focus on youth empowerment, and a design challenge for students to develop an idea for a resilience action project. Teachers can choose to teach any or all parts and invite community resilience stakeholders and practitioners to share their work with their students, and support students in designing and implementing action projects. Some teachers and students chose to host a Community Resilience Expo, where they invited the public to learn more about the hazard and what resources exist in the community to help prepare for the hazard. The project aimed to accomplished the following three objectives: 1) Increase Colorado secondary teachers’ knowledge and confidence to teach about local natural hazards, and to facilitate discussions about community resilience; 2) Increase Colorado youth’s understanding of natural hazards, their community’s vulnerability, and their involvement in resilience planning efforts, and 3) Enhance the capacity and empowerment of young people in Colorado to engage in dialogue with their peers, families, and community stakeholders about community resilience issues and identify, develop, and implement resilience actions. The project evaluation explored the efficacy of the program model and studied the impact of the project activities on students and teachers. The project filled a critical gap in Colorado’s resilience planning which does not include teachers and youth. The project was guided by partners from the NOAA RISA program Western Water Assessment, seven NOAA science advisors, and was implemented together with over 40 community partners, school partners and collaborators from across Colorado. Over the course of the four-year program, the project trained and supported 88 teachers, engaged nearly 2,000 students, and resulted in 9 Resilience Expo events across rural Colorado.

Communities in Colorado are increasingly experiencing major disruptions from environmental hazards, such as fire, flood, and drought. Low-income housing neighborhoods and vulnerable community members in under-resourced rural areas are often disproportionately impacted by these hazards. With the rise in hazardous events across the state under a changing climate, there is a pressing need for communities to become more resilient through better preparation and planning. The Hazard Education, Awareness and Resilience Task Force (HEART Force) program, facilitated by the NOAA Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) Education & Outreach group at CU Boulder, empowers rural secondary students and teachers to act as the change agents to build community resilience against natural hazards. With continued funding, we will continue to support teachers statewide to implement HEART Force curriculum, a place-based curriculum that uses authentic data sources, scenario-based role-play games and the Earth Force process to inspire civic action. We will also be supporting four classrooms across Colorado to go deeper with the curriculum through a quarter or semester-long elective course, by selecting a vulnerable neighborhood to partner with and planning action steps together with more support from CIRES staff, community partners, and local emergency managers.