U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit

This awareness-level, eight-hour course addresses the current science of the causes of floods (both meteorological and otherwise), flood forecasting, flood risk assessment, and best practices for preparation and mitigation for both short- and long-fuse flooding events. Key concepts and discussion topics are reinforced with facilitator-led group activities that utilize real-world flood scenarios that illustrate the diverse challenges and complexities that can occur during actual flood events while building participants' experience and confidence in anticipating, heeding warnings, and responding to floods. The goal of this course is to prepare participants to recognize the conditions that lead to flood events, evaluate their community's risk, and prepare appropriately.

This course presents the tsunami hazard, current hazard assessment tools and products, tsunami warning and dissemination of systems, and effective community response and tsunami risk-reduction strategies. The course is designed to enhance the participants’ abilities to support their organizational preparedness and response efforts. At the conclusion of the course, a scenario-based group activity challenges participants to identify effective actions that help reduce the impacts of a tsunami hazard in their community. This is an awareness-level course that provides a basic understanding of tsunamis, hazard assessment, warning and dissemination, and community response strategies to effectively reduce tsunami risk. The goal of this course is to enhance the participants' abilities to support their organizational preparedness and response efforts.

This course provides a basic understanding of hurricane science, forecasting, warning, and preparedness to help emergency managers, responders, government administrators, and community members make better, more informed decisions in hurricane planning and preparedness. The course enhances the ability of participants to identify and describe the conditions of tropical cyclone formation, provide official watch and warning definitions, and to make recommendations in preparation for a hurricane and the associated hazards such as high winds, heavy rain, and storm surge. The goal of this course is to provide participants with the basics of hurricane science, forecasting, warning, and preparedness.

The National Estuarine Research Reserves, a network of 29 coastal sites along U.S. Coasts and the Great Lakes, host a range of education, outreach, and training opportunities through their Coastal Training Programs. The overarching goal of these programs is to provide current science and skill-building opportunities for decision-makers in coastal communities. The Coastal Training Programs increase audience understanding of the environmental, social, economic, and policy consequences of human activities, and facilitates coordination among stakeholders to support evidence-based policies and actions. Each Reserve’s program is different, and many sites host trainings related to resilience and climate change. Some sites have the flexibility to meet the needs of specific decision makers at specific times by organizing or developing custom trainings for local or regional decision makers. Reserves also frequently host the NOAA Digital Coast trainings. To access training opportunities, or find contact information for program coordinators, select a reserve from the national map. View the Reserve page, and then go to the Reserve Website (under Important Links). Check the Reserve Website for Training, Education, and Outreach opportunities.

The Coastal Resilience Center of the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus is funded by the Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence with a mission focused on education of the community by transferring state-of-practice knowledge through formal and informal learning experiences to help the community understand coastal infrastructure hazard prevention, preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation. Training courses for Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands are programmed and announced monthly.

Thousands of workers are affected by heat illness each year—environmental heat is a recognized hazard. Workers have the right to receive information and training about hazards and their prevention, and it is the employer's responsibility to provide this. In a training, it is important to include the health effects of heat, how and when to respond to symptoms, and how to prevent them from occurring. This OSHA Heat Illness Prevention Training Guide, in PDF format, includes information in short, interactive lesson plans that can be completed in a tailgate or toolbox talk. Training should be in a language that the worker can understand.

This training will teach and reinforce awareness of heat-related illness among coaches, athletic trainers, students, school nurses, parents, and teachers. It will also promote the development and implementation of guidelines by these participants.

EPA’s Local Government Climate Adaptation Training helps local officials, municipal staff, and community leaders understand the changing climate and threats posed by climate change to local government services. The module covers climate impacts to water and wastewater services, air quality, public health, contaminated site management, and emergency response. The training also highlights some communities that have taken adaptation actions and provides a list of resources to support climate adaptation planning and implementation in local communities.

This three-day residence training course provides advanced knowledge in climate modeling, downscaling, attribution of extreme weather and water events to climate, and approaches and tools for developing local climate studies.