Philadelphia releases toolkit to help neighbors talk about climate change

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Do you want to make your neighborhood more resilient to extreme heat and flooding, but don’t know where to start? The city of Philadelphia has a guide for that.

A new community climate resilience toolkit released by the city’s Office of Sustainability is designed to help residents gather with neighbors to discuss growing hazards such as flooding, extreme heat and poor air quality, and what they can do to prepare.

“Climate change is having an impact on how intense and how frequently we’re experiencing those hazards, and they pose a real risk to our public health and safety,” said Jordan Parés-Kane, a climate resilience specialist with the Office of Sustainability. “We want people to have hope, and we want people to understand that there’s a lot that they can do.”

The toolkit is part of the city’s process of creating a new climate resilience plan. The office expects to release the plan next year, assessing the city’s vulnerability to climate-driven hazards and making recommendations for how to address them. The city held a series of workshops with around 400 residents to inform the plan and the toolkit.

What’s in Philadelphia’s climate resilience toolkit?

The toolkit includes slideshows that summarize how climate-driven threats such as extreme heat, flooding and poor air quality are projected to impact Philadelphia in the coming decades. It also includes sample meeting agendas and ice breakers for neighborhood gatherings.

City officials envision gatherings where neighbors discuss how extreme weather affects their blocks and what they can do together to address it. The toolkit includes prompts for residents to discuss things they love about their neighborhoods and resources they wish they had, as well as a prompt to exchange contact information with a neighbor.

Desiree Riley, founder of the nonprofit Mastermind Cooperative, helped the city run the workshops and said participants expressed a need for more educational resources about climate change.

“Many times people don’t even know the correct term for what they’re living through and what their families are being challenged with,” Riley said. “Helping to eliminate a lot of those blind spots is something that the toolkit can do.”

Parés-Kane said residents can use Philadelphia’s toolkit as a starting point to advocate for policy change or more resources from their elected officials. She hopes the neighborhood gatherings result in more residents taking advantage of resources that already exist.

“I’d like to see more people signed up for ReadyPhiladelphia alerts, for example, more people clicking on links for utility assistance, for housing assistance,” Parés-Kane said. “Maybe people also are accessing more resources in … their own community organization.”