Climate Hazard Resilience Forum

Participants will use visualizations to explore potential vulnerabilities to city infrastructures, social networks, and ecosystems from sea level rise, extreme precipitation, drought, and extreme heat, then discuss potential strategies for addressing these threats, focusing on the priorities and needs of relevant stakeholders. At the event's conclusion, participants will make recommendations for increasing their city’s community resilience.

Description

  Length — 2 hours   Table Moderators — Needed

This program is built to have a moderator at each table who will
guide participants through their discussion. Moderators do not
need to be professionals, but should become familiar
with the forum materials and be comfortable leading a table through
a conversation.

This forum was developed in partnership with Arizona State University and Northeastern University and supported by a NOAA Environmental Literacy Grant. These materials were created by the Museum of Science, Boston under the awards NA15SEC0080005 and NA18SEC0080008 from the Environmental Literacy Program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), U.S. Department of Commerce. The statements, findings, conclusions, and recommendations within are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of NOAA or the U.S. Department of Commerce.

This forum consists of four separate modules that are each designed to run for about 2 hours: Drought, Extreme Heat, Extreme Precipitation, and Sea Level Rise. The forum is designed to run with two modules for a total of about 4 hours. Each module can also run on its own if necessary. The forum also includes a third session in which participants are asked to respond to a question created by local resilience planners tailored to local concerns.

This deliberative forum brings the participants through the resilience planning process for various generic cities in specific contexts. Each city is based on a real place, and uses real data but was anonymized for unbiased deliberation. Participants learn and discuss stakeholder values, consider trade-offs of various resilience strategies, make a final resilience plan, and then experience visualizations of how their plan will affect the city and the people who live there.

This forum is visualized through online ArcGIS StoryMaps created by Northeastern University. Click the hyperlink to access the StoryMap for Extreme Heat, Sea Level Rise, Drought, and Extreme Precipitation. To learn how to use StoryMaps for this forum, click here to access the training video. 

 



Preview of Forum Materials

  • Forum board for Sea Level Rise module.

  • Forum board for Extreme Heat module.

  • Forum board for Drought module.

  • Forum board for Extreme Precipitation module.

  • Each participant receives a workbook that gives a brief outline of the materials that are read out loud throughout the forum and gives participants to respond to prompting questions individually.

  • Example of material inside of participant workbook.

  • Example of final resilience plan options and descriptions.

  • Screenshot of ArcGIS StoryMap visualizations for resilience plans.