Adaptation Planning made EISI!
The Exposures, Impacts, and Strategies Inventory (EISI) tools are free customizable tools that support Tribal communities that are conducting adaptation planning.
EISI for Extreme Heat Online
EISI for Extreme Heat Online is an interactive web application that provides data on extreme heat vulnerability and guides you through an extreme heat vulnerability assessment process for your tribe. This tool allows you to easily:
- Assess extreme heat exposures
- Assess secondary exposures
- Prioritize community assets
- Evaluate extreme heat impacts
- Filter through extreme heat adaptation strategies
- Generate a data summary and report for your Tribe
EISI Core
This Microsoft Excel-based tool includes all exposures (drought, temperature extremes, wildfire, melting ice and sea-level rise, storms, and flooding) and contains the most useful indicators and data sources to help your community prepare, make decisions, and take effective action. The latest version was updated in February 2024.
Background
In the past ten years, the Pala Band of Mission Indians’ Tribal Climate Health Project (TCHP) has leveraged funding from California Tribal Research Grants, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), and Center for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for capacity building and dataset development initiatives designed to make it easier for Tribes to address their unique health and climate vulnerabilities using both Western science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK).
Angie Hacker
Prosper Sustainably, Lead Consultant for TCHP
By organizing and sharing what we’ve learned through the EISI tools, we think Tribes can cut out more than half of the external fact-finding heavy lifting involved in early adaptation planning.
The EISI Tool makes Resilience Data more accessible to U.S. Tribes
Across the U.S., Tribes are already facing negative health and other impacts from extreme events and changing climate conditions such as heat-related illness, respiratory illness, water- and food-borne illness, vector-borne disease, and mental and psychosocial effects. Tribe-serving organizations nationwide increasingly recognize the urgent need to enhance access to health and other datasets necessary to help Tribes understand and respond to these growing vulnerabilities.
If you are gathering information to assess Tribal climate change vulnerability and feeling overwhelmed, the TCHP’s EISI tools are a great place to start!
Latest Update
The functionality of these tools is continuously evolving as TCHP aims to make them more useful and user-friendly for Tribes. The Pala Band of Mission Indians uses these tools in their own ongoing adaptation planning and supplemental monitoring processes. With consultants at Prosper Sustainably, they have also worked with Tribes in California to use, test, and refine the tools and to identify outstanding data gaps. Tribal-serving California State agencies enthusiastically recommend and use the tools when supporting Tribal adaptation planning efforts. To further advance Tribal resilience data access solutions, TCHP facilitates a National Tribal Resilience Data Workgroup comprising experts from across the country and various sectors.
The EISI Core Tool was last updated in February 2024. The latest update includes more indicators and data sources (National and California-specific), including those available from the California Tribal Epidemiology Center (CTEC).
The EISI for Extreme Heat Tool web application, which provides data on extreme heat vulnerability and guides users through an extreme heat vulnerability assessment process for your tribe, was launched in May 2026.
Contact tchp@prospersustainably.com for more information.