Event Description

Learn how to build climate-resilient homes,address extreme heat impacts, protect health, and apply practical adaptation strategies for CA.

As one of the most climate-stressed places in the world, California experiences profound and varied impacts across its vast expanse. Preparing for climate change requires learning how to adapt in the face of this change in order to increase the resilience of communities, natural systems, and our built environment to withstand and recover from climate-related disruptions. Climate adaptation and resilience are related, but distinct concepts. Generally, climate adaptation is an action or set of actions that reduces physical climate risk, which builds climate-resilient communities.

This training will provide climate benefits by teaching those who work directly with residents, homeowners, property managers and building owners to understand climate resilient options to make buildings more resilient to the increasingly costly effects of climate change. This will help California achieve a carbon-neutral economy, and workers will be at the center of this effort.

The foundation of this content will be based on communicating to industry professionals what the short and long-term impacts of extreme heat are on worker and community health, with strategic solutions on how to mitigate those impacts. Lastly, it will address climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience by training contractors to adopt best practices for home improvements to reduce the impacts of extreme heat.

Learning Objectives:

• Learn that weather is not the same as climate; climate will impact weather patterns, making them more difficult to predict and more severe.
• Learn that urban areas, while more sustainable in certain elements, can cause a heat bubble in the way we currently design our cities, heating and cooling.
• Learn that our current infrastructure cannot support the all electric goals we have to reduce emissions. Renewable energy will have to replace all current energy use so we need to reduce our use by making more efficient systems along with electrification.
• Learn that we have the knowledge and skills to build climate resilient communities, now we need to change our thinking to make this the standard.