U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit

This course will help to enhance community leaders' understanding of natural disasters, risk assessment in the context of disaster management, prevailing emergency management procedures and operations, and the different vulnerability factors that exist within their local community. The course will also provide participants with an understanding of the necessary plans and tools needed in planning for natural disasters and will help them to better understand and identify the personnel best equipped to address response and recovery requirements in the case of an actual disaster. The goal of this course is to provide community leaders with information on natural hazards and disasters, improve community disaster preparedness, and strengthen community partnerships.

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 awareness-level, four-hour course provides participants with a general understanding of the risks associated with natural hazards and disasters, introduces methods of assessing that risk to vulnerable small businesses, and describes the business continuity planning process to help small businesses prepare for, plan for, mitigate, respond to, and recover from any natural hazard or disaster that may occur. Modules include instruction on identifying hazards to business operations through risk assessment and identifying financial disaster assistance programs and business interruption insurance programs.

This course demonstrates how to integrate risk and community-based collaborative strategies into plans and programs and introduces tools that help communities assess individual risks and vulnerabilities, as well as strategies, to become more resilient and better prepared for natural disasters. The one-day training course provides state and local government agency staff and other stakeholder groups with background on natural hazards. In addition, the course will guide an approach to (1) assess community resilience, and (2) develop next steps for improved resilience. The course is designed for national implementation while allowing integration of local concerns through case studies and focused group exercises.

This one-day, awareness-level training course aims to increase the awareness of the hazards facing coastal communities and basic strategies to reduce the risk to those hazards. This course provides training on the basic science of, assessment of, and preparedness for natural hazards and risks that uniquely affect coastal communities. Examples of these hazards are short-term events such as high surf, storm surge, and tsunami inundation or long-term threats from sea level rise and coastal erosion.

This course helps emergency services and communities better prepare for the climate adaptations necessary and system vulnerabilities that may occur from hazard impacts. After the course, participants will be able to describe the principles of climate adaptation planning for emergency management and existing first-response processes and will be able to discuss the impact of weather on critical infrastructure and key resources while explaining the concurrent effects of climate change on those impacts. Participants will also gain an understanding of how to identify and apply adaptation strategies to address local emergency services-sector vulnerabilities. The course is designed to provide opportunities for participants to learn about various resources that can be used to implement local climate adaptation strategies in their communities.

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.