The Department of Homeland Security prioritizes its need to address climate change, and bolster and enhance community mitigation, adaptation, and resilience to safeguard the homeland from a myriad of threats. A major foundation for this emphasis is Executive Order 14008, Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad. The Department’s mission is further guided by the hope of encouraging, inspiring, and establishing safe measures to address all climate threats while ensuring national and community preparedness.
With this endeavor, communities and neighborhoods across the United States are similarly coming together to address climate change preparedness with the development of resilience hubs.
Resilience hubs are a valuable resource that helps educate, create a point of collaboration, provide sustainable and continuous energy, and shelter from extreme weather and natural disasters.
To demonstrate the effort across the country, to date, 252 resilience hubs operate under a multi-faceted platform that assist localities, states, and communities by educating vulnerable populations, providing supportive research, planning for coastal and climate threats, and establishing physical infrastructure resources to connect communities with resilience and sustainability coordinators across America.
Resilience hubs can be divided into resource functions in accordance with operating goals. Examples of these designations include the following:
- Informational Resource - provide supportive information.
- Research - support scientific research and analyses.
- Planning - support local and state resilience planning.
- Mobile - support a functioning and remote resilience hub model.
- Infrastructure - provide a working physical supportive structure for localities and communities.
- Economic - support financial assessments for resilience capacity.
- Coastal planning - provide supportive planning for coastal climate change threats.
DHS Resilience Hub Finder
To help identify where resilience hubs are operating, the Department has developed a tool to provide members of the public and private sector with the opportunity to learn of localized resilience hub efforts taking place in their specific region. The tool helps identify resilience hubs by name, facilitating organization, state, city, zip code, and organizational weblink.
The innovation and accessibility of the DHS Resilience Hub Finder application will support the Secretary’s Priorities in ensuring:
- Organizational advancement to innovate and transform our delivery of services to advance mission execution, improve the customer experience, and increase access to services.
- Mission-specific advancement to ready the nation to respond to and recover from disasters and combat the climate crisis, are achieved in our mission endeavors.
As the tool is currently live, resilience professionals, emergency managers, and sustainability coordinators are encouraged to utilize the application for collaboration and networking with regional partners as a way of enhancing homeland protection, safety, and stakeholder empowerment.
The DHS Resilience Hub Finder tool can be found on the Address Climate Change webpage along with other tools in Resilience and Adaptation Resources section.
Practitioners and partners alike can use this tool to engage with resilience hub managers and learn about successful strategies for further implementation across the U.S. With this resource, communities can also learn where support can be further provided in the case of regions without any resources to address climate change.
To locate a hub near you, please visit the DHS Resilience Hub Finder.