Latest Trainings Will Lead the Way on Climate Resilience and Equitable Disaster Response
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With the increased impacts of climate change, we are able to expect to see more extreme disasters resulting from more extreme hazards in addition to growing vulnerability to those hazards. As with other disasters, historically underserved communities are disproportionately in danger.
As a part of broader federal efforts to mitigate and adapt to climatological challenges, FEMA has awarded the Columbia Climate School’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness with a $1.5 million three-year training grant to create a national curriculum on climate resilience with a concentrate on equity for today’s state, local, tribal, and territorial emergency managers.
The National Center for Disaster Preparedness has been developing Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) grants trainings since 2016. These trainings concentrate on post-disaster economic and housing recovery and pandemic and mass care, emphasizing how communities can more effectively prepare for and bounce back from catastrophic events. The brand new trainings are a part of the primary FEMA training grant program related to the climate change and equity themes within the agency’s recent strategic plan.
This grant award is an element of FEMA’s larger strategic plan to instill equity as a foundation of emergency management and to steer the entire community in climate resilience.
“Our needs evaluation showed that emergency managers are managing the ramifications of increasingly unpredictable and severe weather events and the culminating recent challenges being imposed on the populations they serve,” said Thomas Chandler, deputy director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness. “As well as, now we have identified the necessity for increased awareness that disasters disproportionately impact vulnerable populations.”
Research has shown that vulnerable populations are most certainly to reside in areas highly exposed to threats attributable to heavier hurricane rainfall, more significant storm surges, deadlier heatwaves, more severe droughts, and the prolonged reach of wildfires. In turn, such disasters are sometimes exacerbating inequality in U.S. communities.
“We must recognize that we face a climate crisis and educate ourselves and the nation concerning the impacts our changing climate pose to the sphere of emergency management,” said FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell.
The trainings are expected to be available in the autumn of 2023. They’ll support communities’ efforts to handle their climate risks, hazards, and vulnerabilities; incorporate strategies into their emergency management programs; strategize more effectively with their community leaders; and cleared the path in creating more resilient and equitable community responses.
About NCDP
The National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP), Columbia Climate School, at Columbia University works to know and improve the nation’s capability to arrange for, reply to and get well from disasters. NCDP focuses on the readiness of governmental and non-governmental systems; the complexities of population recovery; the facility of community engagement; and the risks of human vulnerability, with a selected concentrate on children.
About Columbia University’s Climate School
The Columbia Climate School develops and inspires knowledge-based solutions and educates future leaders for just and prosperous societies on a healthy planet. The Climate School marshals Columbia University’s strengths in basic and applied disciplines and expands its resources to know climate and its impact on society. This unprecedented commitment to tackle humanity’s best challenge builds on the unique history of climate change research at Columbia, dating back to the founding of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in 1949 and spanning the various a long time since.
The training grant is supported by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Cooperative Agreement EMW-2022-CA-00037 and administered by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Points of view or opinions expressed on this document are those of the writer and don’t represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
