The Tribal Climate Health Project’s goal is to build capacity of tribes to safeguard their health in the face of growing climate threats. In developing our program, we determined that we could do much more than just train tribe-serving professionals. We could equip tribes with time and money saving resources to help them move to their adapted future more quickly and easily. This blog will help navigate you to these resources.

Trainings

We’ve developed frameworks and curriculum to help you build a foundation of working knowledge about climate change, health impacts, and ways to identify, evaluate, prioritize and address specific impacts affecting your community. You can find all of our training slides here, which include links to many relevant resources for further learning, including tribal case studies and best practices. You can also find upcoming training opportunities here.

Exposures, Impacts, and Strategies Inventory (EISI) Tool

While conducting the extensive research, literature review, and on-the- ground tribal adaptation planning work necessary to build the training curriculum, we realized we could organize the information compiled in a way that could serve all tribes undergoing adaptation planning. Thus, we built an Excel-based, adaptation companion tool that we call EISI.

Currently in beta-version, EISI allows you to filter climate exposures and secondary exposures by region. For each exposure, it recommends a menu of possible impacts, which you can filter by interest (e.g. health, natural environment, etc). You can assess the severity and likelihood of each exposure and impact in your community by reviewing credible, aggregated data sources for recommended indicators. The EISI tool functions as an editable worksheet to help you track all of this information for your vulnerability assessment and supplemental monitoring needs. It also can help you select, evaluate and plan for over 130 adaptation strategies to increase resilience against your highest risk vulnerabilities. You can download the beta EISI tool here. We would appreciate your feedback as we work to make a more user-friendly version.

Resource Clearinghouse

The tribalclimatehealth.org website hosts a Resource Clearinghouse that features a searchable and filterable list of over 500 resources that can be useful for tribes conducting climate change and health adaptation work. Resources include research-based literature, case studies, sample reports, databases, academic articles, videos, etc. These resources are also mapped to help you locate regionally specific information.

Report Templates

The Pala Band of Mission Indians is happy to share the Word version of its Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment report, which compiles its vulnerability data analysis, literature review, and community engagement findings. You are free to download a copy and use as much of the content or format that is helpful to your specific tribe. We will also share Pala’s Adaptation Plan once finalized.

Survey and Input Gathering Templates

We know it can be difficult and time consuming to gather community input on climate change. TCHP’s Climate Vulnerability Experiences and Priorities Survey is a free Google form that you can email to community members or use as a basis for in-person workshops, interviews or focus groups.

We hope these resources are helpful as you pursue your own tribal adaptation efforts! Please feel free to contact Angie Hacker at ahacker@prospersustainably.com if you have any questions about how to utilize these capacity building resources.