Extreme Heat Forum

Many communities face challenges related to extreme heat and its impacts on human health, ecosystems, and infrastructure. But what to do about extreme heat comes with tradeoffs and considerations. This forum activity brings participants through the resilience planning process around heat for a generic city, named Heattown. Participants use visualizations to explore potential vulnerabilities to city infrastructures, social networks, and ecosystems. They then discuss stakeholder values, consider trade-offs of various resilience strategies, make a final recommendation for increasing their city’s community resilience, and then use visualizations to see how their plan may affect the city and the people who live there. We encourage you to use this activity and then reflect on your experience and how your own community might prepare for extreme heat.