This project, titled enabling heat adaptation by connecting local community evaluation capacity and federal support evaluation criteria, is submitted for the adsci 1 competition

This Cooperative Agreement award from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Climate and Atmospheric Research Federal Grant Program (CFDA 11.431) provides $299,374.00 to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to examine how evaluation strategies can help reduce disconnects between local community capacity to evaluate heat impacts and federal evaluation expectations. The project, titled "Enabling Heat Adaptation by Connecting Local Community Evaluation Capacity and Federal Support Evaluation Criteria," aims to analyze evaluation approaches across California's $105 million Extreme Heat and Community Resilience (EHCR) program, which supports approximately 40 communities annually. The research will focus on understanding how policies, government management, and interagency coordination can help align local evaluation capacity with federal evaluation criteria to improve access to heat adaptation resources. The award period runs from September 1, 2024 to August 31, 2026.

Heat is one of the deadliest and inequitable consequences of climate change, but local adaptation as a response generally lags compared to other climate hazards. There are disconnects between (1) local communities capacities to evaluate the impacts of heat and (2) federal evaluative criteria for accessing resources. These disconnects may hinder the adoption of heat programming that supports local community heat resilience. Despite the proliferation of heat indicators and metrics, their deployment in program evaluation within the broader heat-governance landscape and effect on heat-programming has not yet been fully explored. In order to understand the role evaluation in proliferating critical disjunctures between federal support and local capacity to attain IT, this project examines the experience of communities currently engaging in extreme heat planning and infrastructure investments through californias new $105 million extreme heat and community resilience (EHCR) program, which supports ~40 communities annually and requires 3-15% of funding to be directed toward project evaluation. Our proposed project will analyze evaluation strategies across this emerging network to understand how a combination of (1) policies, (2) management between different levels of government, and (3) interagency coordination can reduce disconnects created by mismatches in local evaluation capacity and federal evaluation expectations.