HRI Trainings

Description of the video:

>> All right, well, hello, everyone, welcome to this webinar, this special webinar on the Hoosier Resilience Index. We did the same webinar right after the tool was launched, and we're excited to repeat it again. So my name is Andrea Webster, and I am the Implementation Manager for the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University.

And I have with me Janet McCabe, and Janet, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself?
>> Hi, everybody, I'm Janet McCabe. I'm the Director of the IU Environmental Resilience Institute, and thanks for joining us today.
>> Great, well, we're gonna go ahead and get started with a short presentation, and then we'll dive right into the Hoosier Resilience Index website and give you a tour.


>> Great. All right, I think I'm gonna kick things off, and then Andrea will pick it up. So about a month ago, we released something called the Hoosier Resilience Index. It's okay, you can go to the second one, thanks. This scene is getting all too familiar in Indiana these days.

This is not so long ago, and of course, these sorts of floods are really problematic for so many reasons. They affect public health, they're a public safety crisis sometimes. They've kept our farmers from getting their seeds into the field this year. They're economically disruptive, and they're very, very costly.

And we know that while floods are not entirely the result of the changes that are happening in our climate, they are becoming more frequent. And scientists in this state and around the world are pretty much agreed that changes in the climate are exacerbating things like the extreme weather that we're seeing here in Indiana.

They're making our temperatures warmer and our precipitation more severe, and seasonally changing the patterns. So let's go to the next slide. At the Environmental Resilience Institute, which is a result of IU's grand challenge, prepared for environmental change, we're concerned about trying to help Indiana become more resilient in the face of the environmental changes and climate changes that are coming.

And we do a variety of different activities. If you're not familiar with ERI and the grand challenge, I hope you will look into the various programs and things that we have. You can look at our website, which is gonna be refreshed in a couple of weeks. It's gonna be even spiffier than it is now.

But it's got a lot of information on it. One of the things that we know is that, let's go back, actually, Andrea, climate change is something that people have to know about, they have to have information about. And they have to understand what might be the impacts on them, and what kinds of things can or perhaps should be done in order to preserve our public health, public safety, economic vitality.

One of the things that we did at EIR last year was a survey to just get a sense of, across the state, where are Hoosiers when they think about climate change? And you can see from these statistics that, in fact, although Indiana, I think, gets a bad rap around the country, most Hoosiers do understand that the climate is changing.

Most Hoosiers do understand that that can have negative impacts on us, and that there are things that we should be supporting that could be done. So now let's go to the next one. If you're not familiar with something called the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment, I commend it to you.

It's a study being produced by scientists from universities all around the state. It's run out of the Purdue Climate Research Center, and they produce information like this. Information that shows, based on data that's been collected and models that are run by many, many scientists, the kinds of patterns that we're seeing here in Indiana.

And this one shows that, indeed, our climate is warming, and that the trajectory of warming has picked up speed since the middle of the last century. So there's plenty of data out there for people to get a sense of what's going on in our climate. Let's go to the next one.

This is a very quick little video that we would like to show you to just introduce HRI.
>> A few years back, we had an intense rainstorm, a heavy, intense rainstorm over a short period of time, and it caught us by surprise. We were told, well, this was a 100-year rain event, this is not something that would most likely happen again.

And nine months later, we had another rain event of similar magnitude. About eight to nine months later, we had the third event, and then it became very apparent that this is not just a one-off. I look back to that first event, I didn't have an answer. I was looking for anything that explained to my council, but more importantly, to my public, is this gonna be something we have to deal with on a regular basis?

And if I can share that information, find a resource that allows me to tell the story properly to those who live in my community, there's tremendous value in that.
>> The goal of the Environmental Resilience Institute at IU and the prepared for environmental change grand challenge is to put accurate and useful information in the hands of decision makers in Indiana.

So that they can be prepared and be more resilient in the face of environmental change. The Hoosier Resilience Index is a tool that's available right now for local governments in Indiana, cities, towns, and counties, to help them understand their vulnerabilities. The index will have two parts. In part one, every city, town, and county in the state will be able to see information, specific for them, on how much warmer it's gonna get and how much more precipitation they can expect.

The second part is something that communities can choose to do, where they can go through a set of questions organized by topic area that will allow them to see how ready they are for increases in temperature, or increases in precipitation and flooding
>> One of the critical components in municipal government is planning out into the future, comprehensive planning, long-term planning.

I don't think ever before we've had a tool that would allow us to look at environmental factors as an overlay into that planning process. I think that's something that the Resilience Index is going to give us, something that I think will be an extremely valuable and useful tool for many years.


>> Having this as a resource to me, especially for smaller communities, being able to partner with IU and find a tool that can help us. And not only the data that's there, but the staff behind it is something that's very important.
>> All right, with thanks to Mayor Spinner and Matt Greller from Accelerate Indiana Municipalities, we're just very happy to have this product to release to local governments in Indiana.

Local governments are one of our key audiences at the Environmental Resilience Institute, because we understand that local governments are really on the front lines. It's mayors looking over their shoulder, seeing a river rise behind them. It's mayors who are answering questions from local residents when it's too hot or their street is flooded.

And so this tool is really designed for them. Andrea will go into details with you, but just generally, The idea of the resilience index it's that it's not to rank communities in Indiana in terms of how risk they are or how ready they are. It's really a tool for each community individually to get an understanding of its own vulnerabilities.

Where they are in the state, and get a sense of how ready they are. And importantly, get exposure to the kinds of things that they might wanna think about, in terms of being readier than they might be right now. So whether it's flooding or hot weather, street flooding, river flooding, bank erosion, that sort of thing.

This tool will tailor questions for them, so that they can identify where their weaknesses are and where their strengths are importantly. It also allows them to create a baseline of their readiness that they can go back to in the future and see how much progress they've made. So we understand that looking ahead as Matt Griller said, is what local governments do.

A key part of their job is protecting public health and safety in their communities. These activities that a community can take on, also can have very immediate impacts including saving money as we can talk about further along. So let's go to the next one. We had some basic underlined principles as we put this index together and I should say that we developed the index with a group of folks at IU scholars, professors, data scientists, risk experts.

But we also got a tremendous amount of input from the users. We put out questions to people, we had four local governments that very kindly were our beta testers last summer. They actually went through and used the index, and gave us incredibly helpful feedback. And we had people like Matt Grailler and Dave Butter from Indiana Association of Counties, giving us feedback all along the way.

Some very important principles for us were that the data used in the index should all be from very trustworthy, credible sources, local, if at all possible, and publicly available. So transparency is really important. Another principle is that as I said a minute ago, this is not an order to rank communities.

There are indices out there, that have been used to rank cities, but we didn't think that would be useful. In fact, Mayor's told us that it wouldn't, so this is not something that is being done by IU on behalf of local government. Because we're not in position to know, how ready local governments are.

The ideas is to produce something that governments can use. It's also important to know that this was designed for Indiana communities. There are other tools out there, that local governments or other institutions can use to rate themselves. But there is none that has been tailored specifically for Indiana.

And we have a specific focus on the small to mid Western communities that make up most of India. So this is designed for you to use if you choose. Another important point is that the local Government can decide to do this at all, but can also decide how to do it.

You can do it in the context of a process where people from the community are involved, or you can choose not to do it that way. We will not be posting scores or results of communities in public places for everybody to see. But we are happy to help along the way, and Andrea will explain all of that.

Another final thing for me to say before I hand it over to Andrea is that this is the first time that we're putting this out to our knowledge. This is a pretty unique tool, we know it can be improved. So we will gladly take people's feedback as they use it so that we can make it better.

I should say I've seen a couple of questions coming in through the chat box. We will make note of those and answer them along the way. And if we at the right point in the presentation and if we don't get to your question, there'll be time at the end for for people to ask other questions.

So I think with that, I'm going to hand it over to Andrea and she can plunge into the details.
>> All right, well thanks Janet. So the Hoosier resilience index, is a tool released by the environmental resilience Institute, and it's designed for local governments in Indiana. The tool is divided into two parts part one and part two, as you see here on the screen.

And this specifically designed to provide information on climate change to every single incorporated city in town and every single county in the state of Indiana. So, we provide information on extreme heat, extreme precipitation, how land is used in the floodplain. And how socially vulnerable different census tracts are within your jurisdiction.

And then secondly in part to the readiness assessment, this is information. This is essentially a series of eight worksheets that are or they can be completed by every single incorporated city in town in the states and every single county. And then as soon as you complete those eight worksheets, then a score is given to you that's calculated by us, here at the Environmental Resilience Institute.

And here are the eight worksheets, you can see that most of them align with departments within your local governments. And I want to go ahead and note now that this is not something that in most cases that one person can complete. You'll need to work across your different departments to work together to complete the answers in the worksheets.

So here we come to the first question we've got, so Catherine Danna asked us can you repeat what the sources of the data that were used came from? So these are the four pieces of data that I said we had earlier, extreme heat, precipitation, land use in the flood plain, and social vulnerability.

So extreme heat provides the number of extreme heat days and nights. And that information, along with extreme precipitation, which is the number of extreme precipitation days per decade. That all both of those pieces of information are provided by the Indiana climate change impacts assessment. And if it's not a document that you're familiar with, it's actually a series of documents.

If this is not a tool that you're associated with, I certainly encourage you to google it after the webinar. It's incredibly useful and provides very tangible information that folks can use and it's an easy to read reports. So the next piece of information land use in the floodplain is data that's been aggregated from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, the Indiana DNR.

And we've also aggregated information from the US Environmental Protection Agency. So that we can show through a map, how land is used in the flood plains that exist within our state. And then finally, we have social vulnerabilities. So there are 15 categories. And this is data obtained from the American Communities Surveys with the U.S. census.

And then we use a methodology, that is provided by the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control Prevention. To provide that information to you in an aggregated form. So we'll show you an example of what this looks like. So in addition to that data, we provide two interactive maps to help you understand that data.

So the first one is a state level map and example you can see here on the screen, where we show heat, both presently how we're currently experiencing heat and then we provide heat, and what is projected to look like, by the 2050s. And we provide this in two different scenarios, a medium-emission scenario, and a high-emission scenario.

So the medium-emission scenario means that as a globe, we will make an effort to significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, at least to some extent. And we will see that in the effects of climate change that we experience. The high emission scenario for the 2050s productions says that as a globe we will not reduce our greenhouse gas emissions or not really make any significant effort to do so.

So that provides a range that you could experience by the 2050s from medium to high range. And then finally we have the developed land in the floodplain and that can be seen on the state level map as we'll show you later on the website. And then finally we have the community-level map.

So this provides the jurisdiction so you can look at the individual county or the individual city or town with the outline of the jurisdiction and you can look at the 100 year and 500 year floodplains, you can look at how land is used. It's color coded across in 90 meter grid cells across your community and then we also have a social vulnerability portrayed as well.

So this is for Wayne, Indiana. So this is an example of the community map that you'll see and so you can see how land is used, the orange here are agriculture and in darker colors you see is developed area. And so in the whiter area is less developed suburban areas is a Fort Wayne.

As you can start to see how got intersects with the floodplain which you see here in blue. So you can start to imagine how you can use this map but we'll go into that in more detail once we take a look at the website. So the social vulnerability information, I told you earlier, is aggregated from the US census and so these are from top to bottom, the 15 different indicators that we pull from the US Census from the American Community Survey.

And then we use the CDC social vulnerability index to aggregate those different indicators into four metrics that you see here. Then we present them in a percentile rank by census tract compared only to census tracts within the state of Indiana. So a census tract in your community is not gonna be compared to the Manhattan census tract for example.

So this is a the same community map that we saw earlier and so you can start to see the divisions of the census tracts, as you see here, and so this is one of them that Muncie, Indiana has, and this one is particularly vulnerable in socioeconomic ways. So socioeconomic vulnerability includes below poverty, unemployed, income or no high school diploma.

And so Muncie can then or really anybody can look into the census tracts in Muncie and figure out, what's happening in that census tract and should the people that live near this floodplain here be concerned. And how are they prepared to respond to flooding because they're very likely to experience it given that the proximity that they have on both sides even.

So that's part I, next I'll move into part II. And so part II is the readiness assessment. So part I is available to anybody. They can go online and you can check out any community in Indiana and see what the climate vulnerability metric show and what the projection show.

The complete readiness assessment is available for anybody to look at. If you want to receive a tailored readiness assessment to your community and complete that assessment to receive a score, you'll need to be affiliated with your local government. So if you are a city staff person or a county, a county or town staff person, you're welcome to contact us and we will give you a readiness assessment that is tailored to your community based on your location whether you are a county government or a city government or a town government.

Your proximity to the floodplain and several other tailored indicators. So the entire readiness assessment includes about 79 questions, but no one community will receive all 79 questions. Again, because they're tailored just as I explained. So to right this readiness assessment, we read through the Indiana climate change impact assessment, as I mentioned earlier, and we aggregated the most important impacts the most important ways that Indiana will be impacted by climate change.

And so there are 22 impacts in readiness assessment and then we outline specific actions that our local government can take to respond and prepare for those impacts. So these are the eight worksheets that I explained earlier. So the 22 impacts are distributed throughout these worksheets, and every single impacts lists between one and five specific actions that a local government can take to prepare respond.

And each of those actions are presented in question form to ask whether you're doing that action or not. So we'll show you an example of this. So here's the first category, the first worksheet, built environments and these are the three impacts that are listed under built environment. So because of climate change in the state of Indiana, we can expect to see an increased stress on roadways, bridges, and transportation systems.

We can also expect to see increased likelihood of river and surface flooding in developed areas and the non developed areas too, but we really care about developed areas in this specific worksheet. And then impact 3, is the increased likelihood of impacts on stormwater management infrastructure. So that's something we're gonna need to be prepared for as well.

So if we can now jump to impact 2 which is increased likelihood of river and surface flooding and undeveloped area. So here are three specific actions that a local government can take to prepare for an increase in river and surface flooding. So they can identify the housing businesses that are most susceptible to river flooding and to surface flooding.

And they can also develop policies and procedures for post flood repairs. So once you have a flood, now you're gonna have an invasion of people contacting you after the inundation of water, you're gonna have an invasion people contacting you to figure out what to do next. And so you need to have a way to figure that out.

And so that specific action walks you through that. So once you have completed all eight worksheets, then you will press Submit and you will receive three scores. You will receive an extreme heat readiness score. An extreme precipitation readiness score, and a floodplain land use score. Now of course you will only receive a floodplain land use score if you actually have floodplain within your jurisdictions, in your jurisdiction.

There are some communities, I think there are over 130 communities in Indiana that have no floodplain within their town's or city's jurisdiction and so they can expect to not be impacted by river flooding. But that does not mean that they won't be impacted by surface flooding. So they should still prepare for that.

And we outlined that throughout the readiness assessment. Now, one question that came in is how long it takes on average for a community to complete the readiness assessment? Now this is gonna vary. So, during the beta test we had one community that was in town and the town manager completed the readiness assessment.

And he's been there for 20 years and so he was able to complete the majority of the questions themselves. And so he said it took him about an hour and a half to two hours per worksheet. We expect that that's gonna be on the low end on the upper end, I think we heard from our beta tests that would it would take approximately, maybe four to five hours per worksheet.

And the reason for that is because you need to contact your colleague and find out. The answer to some of the questions because not one person in a local government is going to know the answer to every single question. So that takes a little bit of coordination time.

But so, we hope that this tool is not overwhelming. We've designed it specifically to be useful but not, not to be too much of a capacity burden. So, I mentioned before that the readiness assessment has 22 impacts outlines 22 ways in which climate change will impact the state of Indiana.

But is not all of the ways in which climate change will impact Indiana. But we've narrowed down to the ones that are most important and are controllable or I should say, can be addressed by local government. So we've narrowed it down to make it a little bit more user-friendly and not so overwhelming.

So once you received your score now what, so the whole purpose of this tool is for the this section the now what, so know at this point you understand what the climate projections are for your community. You understand how prepared you are and what you've done and what you haven't done to prepare for climate change.

So the next step is to go back through your readiness assessment and start to prioritize which of those actions you want to tackle next. So one of our beta testers said while he was completing the readiness assessment that he was working through the questions, and he was always thinking about who he could partner with to make that action happen.

And so this is the step at which you should do that. And so you can sit down with a group of folks over government and talk about which of the actions should be made priority, which you can do this year, which you can do in three years, and talk through what those plans might look like.

And we hope that you will reach out to the Environmental Resilience Institute Toolkit, ERIT, which is an online resource center for local government, just like you trying to prepare for the impacts of climate change and so there you can see funding opportunities, because we all know that you can't pay for everything out of your own community budgets, your own city and town government budgets.

But we hope that there are some opportunities in here that can help you fund those projects. There's also a list of other communities that have done climate responsive plans or that have completed projects to be more prepared for climate change. And so you can find the names of those people along with their contact information, to reach out to them and find out how they did it and get some tips and advice along with that case study and there's plenty more resources on on this website we hope you'll check it out.

We also have a monthly webinar series prepared for environmental change webinar series where we cover topics in which we feature a local government that has completed a project that helps them be more resilient. And then of course we have the Indiana Sustainable Development Program the ISDP, if you haven't heard of this I encourage you to google it right away because the application deadline is next Friday, December 13th.

So this is a program that provides a very talented IU student, either a graduate student or undergraduate to your community if you're accepted into the program to work on the student will work on a sustainability related project over the summer. So applications are open now for next summer, and we certainly hope that you will apply.

So, in summary, what you can do next is you can convene a community conversation. So you've completed all the questions and your readiness assessment is trying to think about what you should do next. And maybe you want some community input on that. Because and maybe at that point, you can reach out to your community members and ask them to do some of the action.

And the readiness assessment. Because as you all know especially those of you that work for local government, you can't do everything in this assessment on your own. It's gonna take folks in the community to step up and do it on your behalf, on the community's behalf provide that resource.

So, I certainly encourage your community conversation. You can also step back and do a comprehensive vulnerability assessment. So this is a process through which you can hire an outside consultant. There are guidebooks that walk you through how to do this in a DIY model. And so, we would certainly encourage you to do this a bit more thoroughly.

So through that process you would look at exactly how climate change is gonna impact the systems that exist within your community. So how ready are your sewer systems for an increase in precipitation for example. Where are all your critical facilities located and are they located in the flood plain and do they need to be moved?

So it'll walk you through all sorts of things like that. And then there's a few other things listed here. So you can use the tool to inform infrastructure or other decisions. You can make sure the planning commission has access, and uses the tool. And you can as well use the Hoosier Resilience Index as a baseline, and plan to do it again in a couple of years.

So, next I'm gonna exit out of this presentation and move over to the website here. And I'll go through this pretty quickly and I see we have a number of questions coming in which is great. And I can answer quickly that our monthly webinars are recorded and they are available on website.

And this webinar here that we're giving today is being recorded and we will make it available on our website as well. So here we are on the Hoosier Resilience Index Website it's hri.eri.iu.edu. And I'm gonna start by just making this a little bit bigger, so that you all can see it a bit easier on your screen.

So the website has three sections divided into three tabs. The first one is about the index. And so this provides all the information about the Hoosier Resilience Index. So it gives a brief introduction, we provide a user manual. Of course today, you're listening to a verbal reproduction of the user manual, but if you prefer to read it or share it with your colleagues, it's accessible here.

We have all the technical documentation included in the methodology section. This methodology section also includes a place where you can download all the data in aggregate for all of the communities as its presented on the websites in interactive form but if you want to see it in the spreadsheet form, you can access that here.

And then, of course, there's some other information too. The rest of the website is divided into these two tabs. So part one CLIMATE VULNERABILITY and part two READINESS ASSESSMENT. You'll notice that these sections do not have drop down menus because they're just one page. So later in the presentation, we'll just click on those and you'll see everything that's listed there.

So but we'll start on the homepage. So I'm gonna start here with the first interactive map. And so, here we see the state of Indiana. And if I jump back to current, I can see what the distribution of heat is, which is provided in a scale of yellow to dark red.

And I can see the precipitation on this map too. So days of extreme precipitation in a decade goes from 1 to 3 drops with the number of days out listed here. And so currently, you could see Steuben County has 1 raindrop. Then we have Hamilton County in the middle with 1 raindrop as well.

And we have Posey county down here in the corner with 2 raindrops. There is a change it to 2050s medium emission scenario, I still have one here. And then I still have one Hamilton County, but I already have 3 raindrops and Posey County, so you can see it changing.

And then as we go into the high emission scenario, Steuben County still has 1 raindrop but Hamilton County now has 2. But in Posey County is still in the last category which is expected to receive the most days of extreme precipitation in the state. And so next I can go and click on developed area in the floodplain.

So now I can compare. So this is the current, or 2010, which is the most recent data that's available. This is the number of acres that is developed, that is also in the flood plain. And so not surprisingly, the areas that are darkest green across the state are our larger cities.

So we have the metropolitan area around Chicago, we have Indianapolis, Fort Wayne. And so that wasn't surprising when when we came across this. If you're curious how to define these different categories, they're extreme heat events. So we can jump back to current year. So for extremely heat events, this is the average number of days per year.

With highs that are 90 degrees greater and nights with lows 68 degrees or greater. And then extreme precipitation is the average number of days per decade when daily precipitation is 2 inches or greater. And so you are certainly welcome to explore this on your own and see the information for your own county.

So I saw that we have a number of folks of Hamilton County on the presentation today. So I'm gonna go ahead and click on Hamilton County here. And because I've picked on this county the charts below have now populated with Hamilton County's information. So I'm gonna scroll down.

So now I can see that, the numbers that are current and the 2050s medium and high scenarios for Hamilton County for both extreme heat and extreme precipitation. And the same thing for land use in the floodplain. So I can now see how land is used in Hamilton County.

So these are the number of acres in the floodplain that are, land primarily devoted to growing crops and raising and harvesting animals. So Hamilton County has 12,000 acres that is dedicated to crops and animals. And that is what makes up 45% of, of the land that is in the floodplain.

And then the developed acreage is 11,000. And that is 42% of the land that is in the floodplain. So of all the land that is in the floodplain 42% or 11,000 acres is developed land. Land that could be inundated by river flooding, and that there could be a significant financial implication or even human health implication, because there are likely people living in those areas.

And as I scroll down, now there's a section on what can I learn from this math. So I've gone over a little bit of this with you verbally today, but I certainly encourage you to read through this and your own. For now I'm gonna point out one thing which is under this Please Note section.

And that's the Please Note that the data displayed shows the number of days of extreme heat, and the number of days of extreme precipitation events. They do not show how hot the days will get or how large the storms will be. So we show the number of stores 2 inches or greater with every emphasis on greater.

We expect that with climate change, the storms are going to continue to get larger, and the same with heat. So we show temperatures that are 90 degrees during the day or greater or 60 degrees at night or greater. It's very likely that those temperatures are gonna be above 90 and above 68.

So next, I'm gonna jump over to CLIMATE VULNERABILITY, which is the next tab over. And so this is the page that's gonna show you the community level information. So I'm gonna go ahead and ask so we have some people from Columbus, Indiana, so I'm going to type in Columbus.

But before I do, I wanna articulate that on this page, we walk you through DIY, or do it yourself climate vulnerability assessment. And so I'll show you what I mean by that. But first I'll type in Columbus, so I type in the first three letters or so, and then I go ahead and click Columbus.

It looks like nothing has happened but it has. We are working on a change to this page because of that. But as I scroll down now I can see that it says Columbus right here, so the page is updated. So as I scroll down. So this is the first section, the first section is Climate Exposure.

This section asks, what is climate mean for my community? So what is that mean for this community of Columbus. So now we show you extreme heat information, but we're gonna show a little bit more broken down. So this shows high heat days. And the three time periods that we've been using before or I guess two time periods and one time period being medium emissions and high emission scenarios.

But first we have high heat days. So this shows the average number of days per year with daily high temperatures that are 90 degrees or greater. But it also is when temperatures are 90 degrees or greater, but at night temperatures are getting below 68 degrees. So high heat night is the exact opposite.

So this is when high temperatures don't get above 90, but the daily low temperature is not getting below 68 degrees. So this is an incredibly important metric, specifically because if our bodies do not have a chance to cool down at night, that is when incidences at emergency room visit increase and we do not wanna see that.

So this is something our communities are definitely gonna care about. And this next one is when we have temperatures above 90 degrees during the day and above 68 degrees at nights. And then this is just a sum of all three. So you can really see for Columbus that it's jumping a lot in this category, from 11, currently to between 38 and 50 by the 20th year 2050s.

And when you look at the totals you can really see it almost tripling, so potentially by the 2050s. So this is really something that Columbus and frankly every single area across the state needs to be concerned about. With precipitation, so this information is specific to Columbus, Indiana. And so currently, they receive 16 days per decade when daily precipitation is two inches or greater, but by the 2050, they can expect to experience between 21 and 22 on average per decade.

So now you have the information that's specific to your community. As I scroll down, we're in the community sensitivity section. So now it says, well, I know I'm gonna get more heat and I know I'm gonna get more precipitation, but does that matter in my community. So now you can look at how sensitive your community is to that.

So here we have an outline for Columbus. And so I'm gonna go ahead and start by zooming in, so we can see downtown a little bit more. And then I'm going to switch my base map so I can actually see what's there. Because you know, I'm from this community, maybe I don't know the roads, but I really know where the high school is and those types of things.

If I zoom in, I'm looking at downtown Columbus. So I'm gonna start by turning on excuse me, the land use classes. So while that's loading, I'm gonna scroll down and show you what that means. So if we look at the legend here, you can see that developed is gonna be the darker colors.

And of course we have commercial, that's white in color. But it's gonna be the grey and black scale for the most part. Water is in blue, protected recreation and conservation areas in green. And then we have working and production, which is mostly agricultural land that's in more of an orange color.

So if we're in downtown Columbus, now you can see that the black areas are developed. And you can see that the green areas are here, and then you can also see these little blue areas where the majority of this little parcel, this 90-degree parcel, or I'm sorry, not 90 degrees, 90 square meter parcel, has some water in it.

So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna turn this back off so you can actually see the land again. And I'm going to turn on the 500 and 100-year flood plains. And so, so now you can see here, you know, maybe there are people living in these areas.

So as I move around, if I come down here, you can see there's definitely some houses in here. And this is in the 100-year floodplain, and then out here we even have some houses in the 500-year floodplain. And so maybe the city of Columbus wants to really think about what's there, how it's developed in the future, and what they can do to help those communities prepare for that type of flooding.

Because, as we've seen, this type of flooding is gonna happen more and more. So next I'm gonna go ahead and turn on some data that's being fed in from the US Census. So we'll look at socioeconomic vulnerability as an example. So, you can see a census tract here that's outlined and this is in dark green.

What that means that it is in the highest percentile for socioeconomic vulnerability across the entire state, so it is in the 75th or above percentile. So I'm gonna click on this and when I do, then some information is gonna show up below for me. So I've just clicked on this census track, which has high economic social vulnerability and has flooding in that area.

And so again here's some land use in the flood plan information, the same as we saw on the home page, but this is very community-specific. And so, if we're going down the social vulnerability, now we can see that that census track I clicked on is in the 75th percentile for socio-economic vulnerability, it's in the 58th percentile for minority status and language.

And 95th percentile for housing and transportation. So that's pretty high. So I'm gonna look and see, what does that mean? So that means that that's based on that area having a high number of multi-unit structures, mobile homes, crowding, maybe a high proportion of people with no vehicle and group quarters.

So this shows all of those Census track variables, aggregated. So it could be one of those, displacing this census track in Columbus into the 95th percentile as opposed to all of them. But Columbus will have to dig deeper to find out exactly what's driving that in that specific census track, and then they can have a conversation about how they can prepare for that weakness.

And how that weakness is relation to the flooding that's gonna happen. So, there's lots of things that individual communities will need to think through. And to help you think through that, we provide a list of questions as I scroll down here. So, here you can think about, well, which households are most likely to not have air conditioning?

Typically, it's those that are low-income. And so now you can think about well, which census tracts are more likely to not have air conditioning? Do the residents in these areas have access to a community cooling center? If they do, are they physically able to reach a cooling center if one exists?

Or is there a need for some additional transportation during heat waves to help certain residents get to those cooling centers? And then we can even talk about service in river flooding. So which census tracts are most vulnerable to river flooding? Are there residents living within those census tracts that are able to evacuate as necessary?

And several more questions. I won't go through them today, but you can certainly explore them on your own. So I'm gonna continue scrolling down this page. Let me go a little fast here for a second to get down to the next section, which is potential impact. So what is the level of disruption to normal community function?

So now you can think about, what are the day-to-day services that your local government provides in your community? And then you can get a whole bunch of people to sit around a table. So specifically, you can, let me scroll back up a little bit here. So an example list of people could be from different departments.

It could be people from your parks department, from community services, from planning and zoning, public health, wastewater treatment, transportation, so get all those people around the table. Take a look at these maps. And think through how these impacts can be avoided, or at least you could be prepared for them.

And so here's another set of questions that this group of people can work through. And if you're coordinating this meeting, I would encourage you to read through these questions in advance. And think about which are more relevant in your community or ones that you really want to spend time on.

And it may take more than one meeting to make those conversations happen as thoroughly as they need to. So as I scroll down the rest of the questions, I'm going to get to the last section, which is adaptive capacity. So that's, are we ready for all these impacts, whether they are high-level impacts, such as heat and precipitation, or downstream impacts, such as whether or not I'm going to experience surface flooding because of that.

So to ask, are we ready, you can do the readiness assessment. And so you can access that by clicking on this button here. Or up here, up on the third tab. Cuz I click this, this section, this page is going to provide some information on what is the readiness assessment.

There's gonna be a readiness assessment request form. So I'm gonna go ahead and click that. And so this is gonna take you where you can fill out the name of your local governments. And then your address, your name, if you're gonna be the liaison coordinating this, and then you click Submit.

And once you click Submit, you're going to receive a tailored readiness assessment, as I mentioned earlier. So this is an example of what you're gonna receive. So this is for example city, Indiana. And so this is built environment that first. Impacts that we saw in the presentation. The first action is repair roadways and bridges for higher maximum temperatures and more free solvents.

So now there's a little description that explains exactly how this action will help alleviate this impact. And as I scroll down you can see that the answer choices are from one to five. So level one says, we have not, the roadways and bridge replacements and new construction process does not account for anticipated higher maximum temperatures or more freeze thought events.

But number five says, the local government has programmes in place to make sure that all new projects and upgrades and repairs are designed in an equitable manner in a way that is resilient to hire maximum temperatures and more phrased though events. So most likely the communities in Indiana are gonna be in between they're gonna be in the one to four range.

And I'm sure we'll get a few that are at the in the five range too. But you can see that the responses go from least prepared to most prepared because we recognize that these are not yes or no questions whether you're doing these things or not. A lot of times you're doing them a little bit, but maybe there's a lot more that you could be doing or maybe you really are doing a whole bunch already in that you're very much, fulfilling that action.

There's also an option for you to check that this question does not apply to your community and in that case, we require you to explain why. And you can navigate in between the different impacts, and will provide a list of all of the questions that are In your tailor readiness assessment once you subscribe.

So that is the end of the review of the website. So I'm gonna stop here and I'm gonna start to go through the questions that came in. Janet, do you have anything that you want to add before we go to the questions?
>> Sorry, needed to unmute myself.


>> No, let's go to the questions.
>> Okay, great, all right, so as you all already figured out, you can type the questions into the chat function. By hovering your mouse over the screen, you'll see a chat icon pop up, click there and type in your question or you're also welcome to unmute yourself by clicking on the microphone icon.

And you can just ask the question verbally. So, the first question I see that we haven't addressed is from Jennifer. And it says what role, if any, does the state government play in the resilience index or any actions that local governments might want to take after engaging with the index?

So, Janet, I might pump this one to you to give my voice a little bit of a break.
>> Okay sure. Happy to and then you can correct everything I say. So, you put these two together. So it wasn't a joint project with or BNR. It isn't sponsored by them or anything.

We've certainly to the extent that Andrea and I engage with staff at IBM and DNR and the Department of Homeland Security, we've certainly kept them informed and sought their input along the way. So I think it's fair to say especially the Department of Homeland Security is quite aware of the tool.

And I think supportive of the fact that we're doing it. The key part of the question is, what role does state government have in local government actions that they might want to take to be more resilient. And that's a very large question that can range from, there might be state funding available, or state technical assistance available for certain kinds of things that you wanna do.

Of course, we're home rule state, so local governments are technically allowed to adopt local ordinances if they're not contrary to state law. But we also know that there have been examples in the state, where local governments have been sort of stopped in their tracks from going forward with local ordinances.

We're actually gonna have our next webinar, which is next week, right, Andrea? Our regular ERI webinar is about local ordinances and sustainability. And we don't have a lot of that sort of action taking place in Indiana, at least that we're aware of. There may be more than we know.

But there are resources out there for local governments that my wish to look at their comprehensive plan or their local ordinances to look for things to be more sustainable. There are lots and lots of things of course that local governments can do completely on their own without the involvement of state government.

And one of the things that we hope to be able to do at ERI is to provide kind of a clearing house for communities that have questions about those sorts of things. So I hope that was a fairly comprehensive answer to that question. Andrea, anything you wanna add?


>> Yeah, I'll add that the questions in their readiness assessment are designed specifically to be for the actions that only local governments can take or community members can take to prepare for climate change. And, of course, as Jenna was saying, there's plenty of ways state governments can contribute to that.

But the readiness assessment was designed such that it's everything that a local government should have control over. So the next question is what was the process for choosing which social indicators to use? So, this question is in relation to climate vulnerability, which I can click on here and if I scroll down to the to housing and transportation minority, status and language.

These are the social vulnerability indicators that are included. And these were based off of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDCs, social vulnerability index. And so those 15 indicators that you saw in the slideshow. Those are the exact same indicators that are used in the CDC's methodology for their social vulnerability index.

So, Angela asks, can an individual neighborhood participate in an assessment? As long they make request through a local government official such as a city council member. So. So, the answer to this question is, I guess most straightforward is sort of, Or maybe no. So, the way that it works is that the readiness assessment is really for actions that are taking place community wide.

And so, but what I should show is that under readiness assessment, if I click here, anyone in any single person can download all the questions in the readiness assessment using this PDF. So if I open this up now, now, I can see every single question that could possibly be included.

And so if a neighborhood, for example, wanted to take a look at part one, Climate Vulnerability, and zoom in to the maps and look at your neighborhood and think about what's there, and how heat and more rain would impact the things in your neighborhood, then you could go through the questions in this readiness assessment and think about the types of things that your neighborhood could do to be better prepared.

So, that would be more of a do it yourself model and you could kind of work through it yourself but the tool was designed to be taken by The readiness assessment was designed to be taken by local governments cuz if you were to ask the local government to make the request, they would be answering the questions in response to the community at large.

So I hope that makes sense but we have tried to make this as transparent as possible but still be very useful.
>> Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question. And I think there's no reason why a neighborhood couldn't do exactly what Andrea suggested here. And all of the vulnerability information, the heat, the dissipation and all of that is going to be relevant.

If you look up Kokomo, that's gonna be, it's gonna be the same information for every neighborhood in Kokomo with the exception of the floodplain-related information. So the climate data that we have, which is from the Indiana climate change impacts assessment, is not at the neighborhood-scale level, it's at the community-scale level or even the county-scale level.

So there's no reason that that you couldn't do that as an exercise. I think one of the great things about putting a tool together like this is that we have in our mind how people might use it, but it's going to be really exciting to see how people actually will use it and the kinds of questions that will come in.

And it's out there, so people should go for it.
>> All right, I know Aaron you had asked if the monthly webinars are recorded and available, and will this one be recorded and available. So once this presentation that we're giving today is recorded, we'll paste it under About The Index under HRI Trainings, so that it will be accessible to anybody that wants to watch it.

And then we do hope to do some other trainings around the state, so maybe there'll be an opportunity for you all to attend in person at some point. So next we say, how often will these data be updated? Extreme heat, extreme precipitation, land use. So this question is about the information that's shown right here on the homepage and on the climate vulnerability page.

So we expect to update these data, some of them will be updated annually. Specifically, the developed area and the floodplain will be updated annually. And then the others will depend on how often the data from the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment is updated, for example, or how often the census is updated, which is on a pretty regular schedule.

So I imagined that we would do an update once the 2020 census is complete as well. So the next question was, and so none of this requires GIS software to access the data, so that's correct. So everything that you can see on the website, you can manipulate, it's just online.

You can access all this information. If you want to download the information in a GIS file, that is available under About the Index, under Methodology. So if I scroll down here, I can see here's his data links and Data References so I'm gonna click that. And so now, this first one says, Hoosier Resilience Index Data Links.

So I can click here, and I can go to a page on ArcGIS online, and I can download the GIS file, the shapefile to integrate it into my GIS files. If you happen to be a GIS person with your local government, or you're just have those skills and are interested, you can certainly download this data and analyze it and more in depth.

All right, well, we're right at 2:00, and we're also out of questions in the chat function. But I do wanna give a chance to that anybody that wants to ask a question verbally. So as a reminder, you'll just have to unmute yourself on the chat bar, I'm sorry, if you hover your mouse over the screen, or the zoom window, you can see a microphone that you can just click and it'll unmute.

And you're welcome to ask a question. Looks like we had one more come in via chat. It says, since the assessment could take some time and collaboration with other local leaders, are you able to save completed questions and come back to complete non-completed questions over an extended period of time?

Answer to the question is yes, you absolutely can. There's no time limit to taking the assessments and your question, your responses to the questions and the assessment will be saved. And even if you get to the very last question and you press submit, but it just so happens you're missing some questions, an error box will pop up and will tell you the questions that you're missing.

And it will take you back to the first question that's unanswered. So we have accounted for that. Is there any attempt to develop the, so that it can account for a larger, for macro-events in the country? It seems to me that Indiana is, I mean Indiana has its own events.

But a lot of people will say things like a hurricane, or a forest fire or whatever, that's not going to bother me. And yet, we might be very vulnerable to drought destroying all the crops or something like that. Is there any attempt to work in the macro events?


>> So. Go ahead Diana.
>> I was gonna give you a break. So you're absolutely right. When there are wildfires in the west, we have increased air pollution here in Indiana. When there are hurricanes on the coast, we can get climate refugees. That's not a very nice term, but people can come to Indiana because they are rained out of their homes, and there's lots of ways we can be affected.

We chose a small number of factors to include in the vulnerability index. And one way to answer the question of why we chose the ones we chose is because those are the ones that we have highly Indiana-specific, high-quality data on. Heat and precipitation, and they're very measurable and they're very linkable to individual communities.

It would be harder for us, I think, to have a a reliable set of data that everybody felt good about about some of these more macro impacts. We also felt that most of the, if you map out all the impacts that can result from high heat and extreme precipitation, you get impacts on public health and impacts on the food supply and impacts on agriculture and impacts on stormwater infrastructure, and all those sorts of things, and air pollution.

A lot of those things, most of those things, can all map back to increased heat and increased precipitation and flooding. So, we felt like they were kind of the leading indicators for climate impacts on Indiana. Andrea, was there anything you wanted to add?
>> No, I mean, I think that covers it perfectly.

I guess the only thing I'll add is that I think Food and Agriculture is one good example of that. In which case there can be local disruptions to the food supply and there can also be global disruptions to the food supply. And so we try to walk communities through some actions they can take to prepare for those impacts, whether they're local or global.


>> Yeah, good question, though. Are there are other questions? This has been a great webinar. Thank you for attending, thanks for all the great questions. I love this chat function. I just think it's so useful. I also like it when people ask questions orally. We hope that, to the extent that you're affiliated with a local government, either you work in a local government or you live in a community, which I guess would cover everybody, that you take another look at this and will think about doing this as a useful thing for your community.

Do feel free to reach out to Andrea or me to if you have questions, we already have a handful of communities that have said they're gonna do this. And so that's great. And it's only been out a couple weeks and we had Thanksgiving in the middle. So if there are audiences that you think would benefit from this kind of a presentation, you may be part of a professional association, a local government group of some sort.

Please do let us know. We'll be working through AIM and Indiana Association of Counties, but there's so many times that people get together. We'd be happy to do this or any sort of a truncated version of it, if there's an appropriate audience.
>> All right, well, thank you, everybody for joining us today.

We'll conclude the webinar now and we'll look forward to speaking with you more about the tool as time goes on.
>> Bye, everybody.
>> Take care.