Dive Brief:
- The federally backed Center for Heat Resilient Communities opened applications on Wednesday for communities to receive financial and technical assistance for extreme heat planning. Applications close on Jan. 24.
- Up to 10 selected communities will each get $10,000 and help to determine the impact of extreme heat on their area, assess their capacity to respond and design a “locally tailored blueprint for heat resilience,” according to a press release.
- The Center for Heat Resilient Communities research center will “also be able to highlight how the experiences and local knowledge of diverse communities can help shape federal responses on heat,” said Kelly Turner, the center’s principal investigator and the associate director of the University of California, Los Angeles, Luskin Center for Innovation.
Dive Insight:
This summer was the world’s hottest summer on record, quickly breaking the record set by last year’s summer. In the U.S., summer 2024 marked the nation’s fourth-hottest summer on record.
Hotter temperatures driven by climate change have sent local governments springing into action to build resilience to extreme heat events through measures such as cooling centers, increased tree canopy, cool pavement and public awareness campaigns.
The Center for Heat Resilient Communities is one of two heat-resilience research centers established by the Biden administration in May. The other research center is the Center for Collaborative Heat Monitoring, which announced earlier this month that it opened applications for a program that offers communities financial and technical assistance to collect local heat data.
Meanwhile, the Center for Heat Resilient Communities is more focused on helping participating local, tribal and territorial governments craft plans for how they will respond during heat waves, including how they’ll fund that response. Non-governmental organizations can also apply for the research center program, as long as they play a leadership role in the community’s heat resilience efforts and have the backing of a local jurisdiction with policymaking authority.
The Center for Heat Resilient Communities aims to work with communities that have demonstrated commitment to collaborating with community groups to protect at-risk people. The center will also evaluate applications based on capacity to work across departments and pre-existing heat-related efforts.
