Grant_Narrative.pdf

2023 Regional Catastrophic Preparedness Grant Program Proposal

Background

City of Tucson Resilience Hub Planning

The purpose of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Regional Catastrophic

Preparedness Grant Program (RCPGP) is to build state and local capacity to manage catastrophic incidents by improving and expanding regional collaboration across the whole community, with an emphasis on vulnerable populations and underserved communities. Extreme heat and drought are several consequences of climate change that are specific to the City of Tucson and the surrounding region, both of which disproportionately affect underserved communities. The City of Tucson’s grant proposal aims to further the region’s overall community resilience capacity.

The proposal seeks to achieve this by better understanding the risks, capabilities, and needs of vulnerable and disadvantaged communities in the region and addressing those needs as part of a broader resilience hub planning effort. This outreach, engagement, assessment, and planning effort will be conducted through partnerships with regional jurisdictions, community-based organizations, climate and resilience experts, emergency managers, and other key stakeholders.

These prospective grant funds will provide the City of Tucson and its respective partners the opportunity to create a flexible and scalable plan outlining how to create resiliency hub networks in the community.

Applicant: City of Tucson, representing MSA #54

Lead POC

Savannah Martinez, Interim Emergency Manager

255 W Alameda St, 10th Floor West

Tucson, AZ 85701

520-833-2588

Savannah.martinez@tucsonaz.gov

Authorizing Official

Timothy Thomure, City Manager

255 W Alameda St, 10th Floor West

Tucson, AZ 85701

520-791-4204 timothy.thomure@tucsonaz.gov Partner Agencies and Organizations Participating

Arizona Office of

Resiliency

Pima County City of Tempe

Southside Worker Center CLIMAS The Nature Conservancy

Tucson Clean and

Beautiful

YWCA SERI

Regeneracion Paisanos Unidos mailto:Savannah.martinez@tucsonaz.gov mailto:timothy.thomure@tucsonaz.gov

Identified/Potential Subrecipients

CLIMAS Regeneracion YWCA

SERI The Nature Conservancy Tucson Clean and

Beautiful

Southside Worker Center Paisanos Unidos

List of all states, counties, and disadvantaged communities that will be involved in the project or otherwise directly benefit from the project

Arizona, Pima County, Maricopa County, 17 disadvantaged census tracts (see numbers below)

Involved Disadvantaged Communities by Census Tract (based on CJEST)

0300 1302 1303 1304

2603 2604 4505 4508

4510 1200 2300 2400

3702 3707 3801 3802

Need

Tucson, Arizona, the second largest city in the state, is situated in the Southwest United States and in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. Being a desert city puts Tucson at risk of several specific consequences of climate change, including extreme heat, drought, and poor air quality.

These climate change impacts felt in Tucson disproportionately affect both underserved and vulnerable communities. A study conducted in 2019 named Tucson as the third fastest warming city in the United States, cementing the city as a focal point of climate change. In 2020, Tucson

Mayor Romero and her colleagues on the Council declared a climate emergency, setting off an effort to develop the city’s first climate action and adaptation plan (CAAP), Tucson Resilient

Together (TRT). The TRT plan is the result of comprehensive data analysis, a climate vulnerability and risk assessment, and a holistic community engagement process. Community resilience is one of five focus areas in TRT, which implements actions to adapt and build resilience to the impacts of climate change, including the proliferation of resilience hubs and strategies to protect communities from climate hazards.

The Regional Catastrophic Preparedness Grant Program (RCPGP) will provide an opportunity for the City of Tucson and its partners to further the region’s overall community resilience capacity. The City’s proposal will move towards this goal by directly engaging underserved and vulnerable communities in resilience solutions, integrate regional hazard management planning with a climate focus, and create the necessary social and networking infrastructure to support the long-term availability, planning, and use of resilience hubs.

A study published on May 23, 2023 (Stone et. al Study), illustrates the catastrophic impact of an extreme heat event coupled with a blackout of the power grid. The study modeled mortality and morbidity associated with an extreme heat event, with and without grid failure, in three U.S.

cities: Atlanta, Detroit, and Phoenix. The authors also assessed the mitigating effects of increased tree canopy and cool roofs. Key take-aways from the study:

• In Phoenix, mortality associated with a 5-day extreme heat event increased by about 700% during a blackout as opposed to have a functioning electrical grid and heat-related morbidity

(captured as emergency department (ED) visits) rose more than 3000%.

• The resulting mortality rate was modeled at approximately 13,250 deaths or nearly 1% of the population. This estimate is supported by data from the Maricopa County Public Health

Agency showing a 1.6% heat mortality rate among the unhoused population in 2021. Heat-related ED visits were shown to be approximately 816,570 people or more than 50% of the population.

No other moderately-probably hazard for the Tucson urban metro area poses the loss of life and health impacts that are projected in this study. According to the Pima County Multi-Jurisdictional

Hazard Mitigation Plan (PCMJHMP), “During the summertime, extreme heat is generally handled well by the community dependent on the reliable delivery of electric power so that residents and businesses can cool their homes and buildings. The potential for electrical system failure during the summer due to storms, wildfires, or overuse/stress on the system are realities that Tucson as a city has begun to address more thoroughly in our planning processes as electrical system failure resulting in a long-term power outage would leave a large portion of the city vulnerable to heat-related illness during late spring, summer, and early fall where daytime temperatures exceed 90°F.” (emphasis added) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37219950/ https://content.civicplus.com/api/assets/38f93fea-bcd2-4682-82d9-6907c202eba0 https://content.civicplus.com/api/assets/38f93fea-bcd2-4682-82d9-6907c202eba0

Addressing Inequities/Disparities

The City of Tucson has a long history of considering the varying vulnerability of neighborhoods in planning and decision-making, starting with the development of the Poverty and Urban Stress

Index in 2007. The City has since supplemented that Index with the Tree Equity Score to address specifically the urgent risk of extreme heat/urban heat island effects (EH/UHIE) and the significant disproportionate impacts to disadvantaged communities. The disparity in heat impacts, and the reliance of disadvantaged communities on public cooling locations, is well captured in this quote from a 2019 Guardian article: “If you lay an extreme heat map over a map of low-income areas, it’s the same map.” In these neighborhoods especially, Tucsonans lean on public spaces like libraries as shelter from the heat. The inequity of heat impacts is underscored by data from the Arizona Department of Health Services which found that statewide, in 2021, 84% of indoor heat deaths were in homes that had air conditioning. The owners either could not afford to run the A/C, the A/C was inoperable because they could not afford to maintain it, or the power had been disconnected.

Focus Core Capabilities

This project will focus on the core capabilities of Long-Term Vulnerability and Community

Resilience. For the Housing core capability, the project will leverage a recently awarded grant to develop southwest-adapted climate resilient building codes by encouraging adoption of improved building codes. These core capabilities demonstrate some gaps when compared against an emergency event such as extreme heat and down Powergrid especially when looking at our ability to support at risk and vulnerable populations. The following sections provide a capability assessment by core capability.

Long-term Vulnerability

The Tucson metro area is planning for, and empowering community member response to, climate risks by developing regional climate mitigation and adaptation plans grounded in outreach and training of community-based organizations that represent disadvantaged communities. The City’s

Climate Action and Adaptation Plan (CAAP), developed with targeted input from disadvantaged communities, identified resilience actions needed to reduce community vulnerability. Tucson is working to reduce community vulnerability to extreme heat through investment in resilient systems, communities, and critical infrastructure with City programs such as the Tucson Million

Trees initiative, Storm to Shade GSI financing, and water harvesting rebates, all of which use the

Tree Equity Score and/or a promotora model to prioritize investments in disadvantaged neighborhoods. While the Stone et. al study demonstrated that a 50% increase in tree canopy does result in a measurable decrease in heat-related mortality and morbidity, the authors noted that the impact is muted in desert environments due to the impact of extreme heat on tree evapotranspiration and a lessening of their cooling affect. Green infrastructure strategies are less costly than other heat mitigation approaches, but they take time to implement and become established sufficiently for maximum effectiveness. A 50% tree canopy, even if achievable, could not fully mitigate the impact of a combined heatwave and grid failure. Recognizing this gap in capability, the CAAP calls for implementing community-driven resilience hubs, targeted community vulnerability reduction education and resources, and addressing shade equity as part of a comprehensive heat mitigation plan.

Community Resilience https://povreport.tucsonaz.gov/ https://povreport.tucsonaz.gov/ https://climateaction.tucsonaz.gov/pages/milliontrees-tree-equity https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/31/tucson-heat-inequality-summer https://assets.tucsonaz.gov/share/gis-docs/caap/TucsonResilientTogether_20230228.pdf https://climateaction.tucsonaz.gov/pages/milliontrees-tree-equity https://climateaction.tucsonaz.gov/pages/milliontrees-tree-equity https://climateaction.tucsonaz.gov/pages/gsi https://www.tucsonaz.gov/Departments/Water/Water-Info/Water-Rates-and-Rebates/Apply-for-Water-Conservation-Rebates

Community Resilience enables the recognition, understanding, communication of, and planning for risk, and empowers individuals and communities to make informed risk management decisions necessary to adapt to, withstand, and quickly recover from future incidents. The

Tucson region has robust outreach programs in many emergency management divisions, however, like other communities, these programs have challenges reaching all the most at-risk and vulnerable populations. Tucson also has a significant population of immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees that are more difficult to reach as well as populations that are multilingual or monolingual in languages other than English. As previously mentioned, we are actively executing CAAP which carries an emphasis on community-wide resilience to the current and future impacts of climate change. We will leverage this plan throughout the project to complement the Resilience Hub planning effort. To ensure we engage the harder to reach populations just mentioned, we will work closely with our community partners that have existing relationships with these groups and alter our outreach/workshops to address their needs.

Housing

While this project does not directly focus on housing capability, it will leverage the Resilient

Southwest Building Code Collaborative, a $3.5 Million project funded through Department of

Energy’s Resilient and Efficient Codes Implementation (RECI) program. This Collaborative is a partnership between 10 jurisdictions and state energy offices in Arizona and New Mexico, and numerous technical and community-based partners, to develop a Regional Resilience Code, including appendices on Extreme Heat and Greening Existing Buildings. This code will be developed with community-based organization-led engagement of disadvantaged communities to focus explicitly on climate resilience and equity in the code by focusing on issues such as thermal comfort, passive survivability, air quality, energy burden, and energy security.

Addressing these issues in new and retrofitted housing will result in significant improvements to community resilience to EH/UHIE, as well as secondary impacts such as air quality (driven by extreme heat and wildfires), drought (mitigated through water harvesting), and flooding

(mitigated through green infrastructure). Tucson intends to use this project as a means to educate other metro-area jurisdictions about the Regional Resilience Code and its importance to community resilience, which will be published by the International Code Council, in an effort to encourage adoption of the code.

Proposed Project

The project proposed here aims to further the region’s community resilience capacity by better understanding the risks, capabilities, and needs of vulnerable and disadvantaged communities and addressing those needs as part of a broader resilience hub planning effort. This effort will be conducted through partnerships with community-based organizations, climate and resilience experts, emergency managers, and other key stakeholders. Potential resilience hub locations will be identified based on actual community needs and will be assessed regarding their ability to support community resilience across all hazards.

The objectives of the proposed project are to:

(1) Develop a plan for implementing resilience hubs in target at-risk and disadvantaged communities with the support of trusted community-based organizations.

(2) Build capacity in these communities to advocate for their resilience needs, identify resilience enhancements, and pursue resources to implement those improvements.

(3) Develop partnerships and a long-term community engagement approach to sustain implementation and continued enhancement of resilience hubs in these communities.

(4) Better integrate the newest climate science into regional emergency management planning and build a regional approach for expanding this project to additional neighborhoods.

(5) Facilitate information sharing and collaboration between Arizona jurisdictions wanting to implement resilience hubs and the non-profits and community-based organizations leading this on-the-ground work in Arizona communities.

(6) Develop a shared education and community investment tool to empower community members across Arizona to advocate for investment in improving community resilience, including the development of resilience hubs, in their communities.

These six objectives intentionally scale from neighborhood-level planning and capacity building to metro-wide education and coordination, to regional (multi-metro) knowledge sharing and collaboration, and finally, national dissemination. Objectives 1-3 will be implemented in two multi-neighborhood scale target areas in the Tucson metro area. This project will utilize the nationally recognized resilience hub resources and guidance developed by Urban Sustainability

Directors’ Network (USDN), plus a new education and capacity building tool, the Urban Heat

Leadership Academy, as the framework for achieving these objectives. This neighborhood scale work will involve local community-based organizations to both engage with and provide resources and support to target areas. Objective 4 will focus on Pima County metro area hazard mitigation planning and will be developed collaboratively between the City of Tucson’s

Emergency Manager, Pima County’s Office Emergency Management, other local emergency managers, and regional climate scientists (CLIMAS). Objectives 5-6 will involve regional collaboration across multiple metro areas, including Tucson, Pima County, Tempe, and Mesa, and build upon existing heat mitigation and resilience hub planning efforts.

Objectives 1-3: Neighborhood-Scale Resilience Education, Planning, and Capacity Building

Implementing resilience hubs across a community can be a challenging effort. Community members often view non-governmental facilities as trusted locations to gather. However, the cost and logistics of operating, maintaining, and enhancing a resilience hub is often beyond the capacity of many community-based organizations. Developing a feasible approach for implementing resilience hubs requires communication, trust and relationship building, transparency, and mutual responsibility. The proposed project builds on existing community capacity building resources and engages trusted partners to build the robust social infrastructure essential to support the planning, implementation, and long-term maintenance of resilience hubs.

There are 241 census tracts in Pima County. Ninety-one (91), or nearly 38%, are classified as disadvantaged in the CJEST tool. Because of the large number of disadvantaged tracts, the CDC

Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) was used to further refine the target area for this project. An overall SVI ranking (RPL_THEMES) of 0.95 was applied as a filter (see Supplemental Project

Map). This filter highlighted a band of census tracts running north to south along the west side of the city that overlap with multiple previous, existing, and soon-to-start planning efforts. The north focus area will include census tracts (prefix 0401900): 0300, 1200 (portion), 1302, 1303, 1304, 2603, 2604, 4505, 4508, and 4510. The south focus area will cover tracts: 2300, 2400, 3702, 3707, 3801, and 3802.

http://resilience-hub.org/ https://www.usdn.org/index.html#/ https://www.usdn.org/index.html#/ https://www.nature.org/en-us/newsroom/urban-heat-leadership-academy/ https://www.nature.org/en-us/newsroom/urban-heat-leadership-academy/

Leveraging Existing Social Infrastructure, Ongoing Planning, and Upcoming Heat Monitoring

A major driver in selecting these specific census tracks is that they all lie roughly along the Norte

Sur e-TOD transit planning corridor. The Norte Sur project is funded through FTA’s Pilot

Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) Planning Program to develop a strategic plan to guide future land use and real estate investments, infill development, and growth within the communities surrounding an important regional North-South transit corridor. Aligning with

Norte Sur, which links all three main transit stations in the region, also supports an explicit focus on transit accessibility to potential resilience hubs. In addition, the Mayor and Council have directed staff to consider how a micro-grid system could be implemented along the corridor, further enhancing its resilience potential. The north focus area also overlaps with the Thrive in the ’05 initiative, which builds from a HUD-funded Choice Neighborhoods program supports locally driven strategies to address struggling neighborhoods with distressed public housing through a comprehensive approach to neighborhood transformation. The northern focus area also includes the recently designated Pascua Yaqui North tribal lands. The southern focus area centers on the La Doce community, which has been the focus of multiple planning, infrastructure, and community development projects over the past decade. The southern focus area also includes the

City of South Tucson. This project will also leverage the recently-funded Southwest Urban

Corridor Infrastructure Field Laboratory (SW-IFL) project which will develop and deploy novel observational and modeling capabilities to improve understanding of extreme heat as a central driver of key environmental outcomes, including greenhouse gas emissions, urban water stress, and fate and transport of urban air pollutants in Arizona. The SW-IFL Tucson team has identified both near-term and longer-term “test beds” for this 5-year project. The near-term test bed will coincide with this project’s northern focus area and the longer-term site is expected to overlap with the southern focus area. The project involves detailed measurement of environmental conditions, such as heat and air quality; development of policy interventions to improve resilience; implementation of selected resilience solutions; and reassessment of environmental conditions to evaluate change in response to those actions. SW-IFL will enable this project team to understand changes in risks due to climate and other hazards to the targeted areas. This knowledge can help inform the enhancement and evolution of a physical resilience hub system.

This proposed project will borrow from previous successful community engagement efforts by contracting with a community-based organization that is an established resource for disadvantaged communities. This organization will serve as a project manager and, in the promotora approach, hire community members to serve as Community Resilience Ambassadors

(CRA) to lead the on-the-ground work with community members in each of the target areas. This may be done through a contract with an organization pending logistics of the hiring process. This approach builds capacity in both the coordinator organization and the Ambassadors, which strengthens their ability to advocate for their community beyond the immediate project. This increased capacity will be essential to the long-term success of resilience hubs. Being a CRA requires a commitment of time, plus the capacity and skills to do the needed work. Therefore, this project will leverage existing community organizing/advocacy capacity building programs such as the Pima County Justice Summer program, the grassroots organization Regeneración’s

Armando el Barrio program, and City-funded Community Ambassadors through the Thrive in the ’05 and Tucson Norte Sur projects, by inviting participants in these programs to apply to be

CRAs. The CRAs help lead/facilitate resilience hub planning workshops (Year 2), advise on the https://www.tucsonnorte-sur.com/about https://www.tucsonnorte-sur.com/about https://www.transit.dot.gov/TODPilot https://www.transit.dot.gov/TODPilot https://www.tucsonaz.gov/eTODStrategicPlan https://www.thriveinthe05.com/place-1 https://www.thriveinthe05.com/place-1 https://www.azmirror.com/blog/old-pascua-would-officially-be-pascua-yaqui-land-under-bill-approved-by-u-s-house/ https://www.tucsonaz.gov/files/sharedassets/public/city-services/planning-development-services/documents/south_12th_ave_-_list_of_efforts_2-14-20_0.pdf https://www.tucsonaz.gov/files/sharedassets/public/city-services/planning-development-services/documents/south_12th_ave_-_list_of_efforts_2-14-20_0.pdf https://sw-ifl.asu.edu/about https://sw-ifl.asu.edu/about https://extension.arizona.edu/hispanic-heritage-promotoras-continues-be-strength-cooperative-extension https://www.basebuilding.net/arizona_justice_summer https://www.instagram.com/barrio_campesinxs/ https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Flookaside.instagram.com%2Fseo%2Fgoogle_widget%2Fcrawler%2F%3Fmedia_id%3D2581793070832264653&tbnid=6t9JazbhkxsHTM&vet=12ahUKEwiXmcOpivj_AhWUB0QIHXEdBSYQMygAegQIARAu..i&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.instagram.com%2Fbarrio_campesinxs%2F&docid=9TkitvF81G3znM&w=1440&h=1800&q=tucson%20%22armando%20el%20barrio%22&ved=2ahUKEwiXmcOpivj_AhWUB0QIHXEdBSYQMygAegQIARAu https://www.thriveinthe05.com/news-and-updates/2021/6/3/neighborhood-ambassador https://www.thriveinthe05.com/news-and-updates/2021/6/3/neighborhood-ambassador https://www.tucsonnorte-sur.com/community-ambassadors development of a final report that reflects all community input throughout the project (Year 3) and support the overall project as appropriate.

Adapting Existing Tools to Support Community Resilience Education and Project

Implementation

The Nature Conservancy’s (TNC) Phoenix urban program has developed and implemented a successful Urban Heat Leadership Academy (UHLA) that “builds the capacity of Phoenix residents, so they have the knowledge, resources and skills to advocate for greener, healthier and cooler communities.” The UHLA is free of charge, offered in both Spanish and English, and graduates can apply for a micro-grant to fund a community project informed by the program.

According to TNC, participants in the 2022 program “said their confidence to advocate for greener neighborhoods increased dramatically.” Projects funded through the mini-grant included implementation of a shaded corridor in south-central Phoenix, planting of desert-adapted fruit trees at two sites located in food deserts in central Phoenix, and partnering with a church in south

Phoenix to open a cooling center. The City of Tucson, with partners, will adapt this resource to into a Community Resilience Leadership Academy (CRLA) to educate the community about climate risks and other hazards and building community capacity to advocate for and implement community-driven resilience projects. TNC has agreed to be a technical resource and work with this project team to modify the UHLA into the CRLA. Technical and community partners will assist with developing the CRLA. A draft CRLA curriculum will be developed in Year 1, it will be used as the basis for educating participants in the resilience hub planning workshops in Year

2, and will be piloted, including providing mini grants (we are renaming to CRLA Community

Resilience Contracts) for projects to enhance community resilience, in Year 3. The resilience hub planning workshops in Year 2 will serve to (1) build from Year 1 survey work to better understand community resilience risks and needs, (2) educate community members using the draft CRLA curriculum, (3) tweak the CRLA based on community feedback, (4) assess and develop recommendations for potential physical resilience hubs and investments needed to enhance those locations.

For the CRLA pilot and mini-granting process, the CRAs will recruit applicants from target area with a goal of 8 participants per area (or a number appropriate pending the CRLA pilot development). The CRLA instructors will be drawn from the technical and community partners that assisted with the development of the CRLA, with the trainers chosen based on the final curriculum developed. At the end of the CRLA, the participants from the target area will, with the support of their CRAs and mentorship of the technical and community partners, develop a project to improve community resilience in each of their respective neighborhoods. Each team will be provided a grant to implement their project that covers materials and supplies, labor, and compensated mentorship from appropriate technical and/or community partner(s) to assist with planning and implementation. Pairing with mentor organizations also has the advantage of continuing to build trust between these organizations that implement resilience work and the broader community, which can support relationships that further advance resilience work after the grant period. This mentorship also builds capacity in community members by helping them understand how to effectively plan and manage community projects.

Objective 4: Metro Area Hazard Mitigation Planning http://phxrevitalization.org/ccs/thenaturesconservancy/leadershipacademy/index.htm

There is a need to engage regional emergency managers and climate scientists in improving forward-looking estimations of risk and vulnerability resulting from climate change to support more proactive and comprehensive hazard mitigation planning. The PCMJHMP notes that “The scope and severity of cause and impacts relating to climate change are still difficult to predict and highly debated. There is, however, a growing body of science and research that indicates a few noticeable trends that should be considered when evaluating natural hazard vulnerability and risk.” The report, for example, does not indicate that wildfire or drought offer significant direct risks to the Tucson metro, however, because this assessment does not reference secondary impacts such as air quality impacts from wildfire smoke and drought stress on the green infrastructure that is a key mitigation tool against extreme heat/urban heat island effects

(EH/UHIE). Constant progress is being made in understanding these climate trends which can be seen in what the City has done with its droughts and water supply planning. Another component of this proposed project is to collaborate with Pima County Office of Emergency Management to improve how the PCMJHMP leverages the work of CLIMAS, which was established at the

University of Arizona in 1998 as part of NOAA’s Regional Integrated Sciences and

Assessments program, to bring cutting-edge climate science to the planning process. There will be at least one e educational session for emergency managers across the Tucson/Pima County metro area. At least one of these sessions will focus on educating other jurisdictions on the regional climate-resilient building code that Tucson is helping develop under the DOE RECI grant. The goal of this education will be to encourage other jurisdictions to adopt the code along with Tucson.

Objective 5-6: Regional Collaboration and National Dissemination

A criticism of the existing UHLA is that it is tightly focused on the City of Phoenix and, as a result, is not readily adaptable to other communities. The cities of Tempe and Mesa, as well as

Phoenix-metro community-based organizations, will provide input into the development of the

CRLA with the goal of making it more applicable and easily adaptable to other communities.

The project team has had positive discussions with the Arizona Partnership for Healthy

Communities and Arizona State University’s emerging Resilience Hub information exchange as being the possible convener for a regional/statewide knowledge sharing network. Both have indicated a willingness to do so, and having multiple avenues for this discussion would extend the reach of the network. Staff from Tucson will also share their experiences and lessons-learned with other communities through their membership in USDN. USDN is in the process of hiring a

Resilience Hub Coordinator and the project team will work with this person to ensure that the

CRLA, final report, knowledge-sharing opportunities, and other resources are made available to

USDN’s 270+ member communities.

Project Deliverables:

• Survey results of risks, capabilities, and needs for target areas that identify potential resilience hub locations and trusted community organizations.

• Approximately 18 community workshops in target areas to (a) educate community members about climate risks and resilience solutions using the draft CRLA and (b) assess current capacity and resources at potential resilience hub locations to identify gaps that need to be addressed to better meet community needs. These workshops will also serve to build additional trust and relationships between community members and community-based organizations that may own, manage, or provide programming at future resilience hubs.

https://tucsononewater.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/One-Water-2100-Plan.pdf https://arizonahealthycommunities.org/ https://arizonahealthycommunities.org/ https://resilience.asu.edu/resilience-hubs

• Final Gap Report developed from workshop findings which identifies potential resilience hub sites, community assets, priority needs, and recommendations for organizational elements and funding opportunities to close capability gaps and build out resilience hubs.

• Summary of planning process to support replication in other areas/communities.

• An educational and capacity building curriculum (Community Resilience Leadership

Academy) that addresses climate risks and hazards for Arizona residents; climate trends;

vulnerability, resilience, and adaptive capacity; the what, why, and how of resilience hubs;

resources and partners that can assist in community-driven resilience projects; and strategies for organizing and advocating for external support in these efforts. This curriculum will include both pre-recorded sessions, in both English and Spanish, that are generalized sufficiently to work for multiple communities and can be provided online, either on-demand or as a structured course, or in-person. This will be coupled with supporting written “lesson plans” for local community-based organizations to provide in-person sessions that supplement the more generalized prerecorded sessions with community-specific information on resources, resilience solutions, and organizing/advocacy strategies.

o The CRLA will be piloted toward the end of this project with an intended class of 30 community members (or a number appropriate pending CRLA development), concluding with the implementation of two resilience projects, ideally supporting a proposed hub site, in each target area.

• A collaborative approach for climate science to be better integrated into the next PCMJHMP update (2027).

• At least one educational session with regional emergency managers to (a) provide an update on climate trends and impacts in the region, (b) share approach, outcomes, and recommendations from resilience hub planning process, and (c) explain the regional resilience building code and how it was developed to improve community resilience to climate hazards.

• A resilience hub knowledge exchange that starts a statewide knowledge base around resilience hubs, builds relationships between jurisdictions and community-based organizations through the state, and promotes future collaborations to strengthen approaches to resilience hub implementation.

o

Roles and Contributions of Project Partners (see Supplemental Partner List for specific organizations)

City of Tucson

Project Manager

• Manage overall project budget, grant reporting, and contractor oversight.

• Manage contracting organizations to support. The responsibilities of these organizations are outlined in the relevant sections below.

• Provide coordination between all other partners, contractors.

• Support/participate in outreach, development of surveys, planning of workshops, analysis of survey results and workshop findings, emergency planning-climate science integration, education sessions, and knowledge exchange.

• Support integration of final report recommendations into other City of Tucson plans.

• Work with jurisdictions and partners in the region to identify additional technical partners to support the CRLA development and pilot.

• Coordinate with other City Departments on other resilience related efforts, including existing technical assistance, rebates, loans, or grants that could be leveraged to support the project.

• Support the development of the final report and bring recommendation back to City administration and Mayor and Council.

Other Departments

• Coordinate on the development of Regional Resilience Code, including education sessions for metro area emergency managers.

• Support engagement through the existing Norte Sur project.

• Participate in resilience hub knowledge exchange, including identifying non-profits, community groups, jurisdictions, researchers and others that can contribute to the exchange.

• Share project outcomes and lessons-learned with USDN.

Pima County

• Public Health Emergency Preparedness (PHEP) will assist in community outreach for the project, including identifying potential technical partners.

• PHEP will assist in planning a public health response, including how resilience hubs are utilized.

• Office of Emergency Management will collaborate with City of Tucson and other partners in this grant to develop an approach to integrating current climate science into regional emergency management planning.

• Provide input on CRLA and feedback on other materials.

Other Jurisdictions (Cities, Tribal Nations)

• Assist with engaging their constituents in current target areas and/or identifying future target areas for replication of process.

• Participate in Tucson metro area education sessions and/or regional knowledge exchange.

Contracted Community Roles

The planning process will be conducted to the extent possible through contracted community organizations and advocates for true grassroots engagement.

• Local Organization o Hire and manage Ambassadors o Support Project Manager and consultants in designing surveys, analyzing survey results and workshop findings, and developing outreach materials o Plan and conduct workshops, including supporting the Ambassadors in community outreach o Work with Project Manager to develop final report including potential resilience hub sites, community assets, and priority needs

Contracted Technical Resources

Contracted resources will be a blend of community organizations, non-profits, and university faculty (as availability allows) with expertise in regional climate science, resilience solutions, community advocacy and organizing, and any other topics determined to be appropriate for the

CRLA. When selecting technical resources, there will be a preference for those with experience working with disadvantaged communities and/or have done place-based resilience work within the target areas. Additionally, community partners that were critical in the development of the

City’s climate action plan, Tucson Resilient Together, will also be key collaboration partners to these efforts.

• Provide technical expertise in the development of CRLA, Tucson metro area educational sessions, and/or regional knowledge exchange

• Provide instructors for test (Year 2) and pilot (Year 3) of CRLA

• Provide mentorship and assistance to CRLA graduates for planning and implementation of community resilience education contract projects

• Provide community engagement support through their work and relationships in target areas

Consultant Support

Additional contracted support is expected to supplement the expertise of the Project Coordinator and City staff. Tucson will attempt to provide this support through in-kind assistance where possible.

• Advising on survey design

• Analysis of survey and workshop findings

• Design and printing of communication materials and final report

• Translation services for surveys, CRLA videos, communication materials, and final report

Impact

The project will directly build capability in the Community Resilience and Long-Term

Vulnerability Reduction core capabilities and leverage a separate project to build capability in the Housing core capability area.

Community Resilience

This project will build community resilience by educating communities about climate risks and other hazards, resilience solutions, and strategies for advocating and implementing change in their neighborhoods. It will do this by creating an education and capacity building program

(Community Resilience Leadership Academy) that will be piloted during this project and implemented post-project. The project will also support a community-led planning process to identify resilience hub sites at trusted locations and managed by trusted community entities to complement the existing cooling centers managed by the City and County. The underlying data in CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index highlights aspects of the high vulnerability of these target areas, as well as the likelihood that many residents would be hesitant, or even unwilling, to use a typical government-owned or run cooling center. It is this hesitancy that makes small, community-based resilience hubs critically important to protect vulnerable residents. Some of the markers of vulnerability in these tracts age the percent of residents 65 years and older (12.8%, average across the tracts), amount of mobile homes (13.2%), percent of residents uninsured

(18.3%), and the percent of resident house cost burdened (42.6%). House cost burden is particularly a concern because, while most homes in Tucson have air conditioning or evaporative cooling, there is evidence that many people cannot afford to maintain or run those appliances.

Residents of the target census tracts are also largely minority (74.3%), and a significant proportion (10.6%) have limited English-speaking ability. A trusted network of community-based resilience hubs is therefore needed as part of a robust community resilience approach.

Performance metrics: The Project Manager’s report will include the number of communities engaged, number of individuals engaged, and number of outreach events. There will also be follow-up surveys of workshop participants and CRLA graduates to see how their understanding about the risk of extreme heat and how to protect themselves has changed as a result of the project.

Estimated Capability Assessment after Project: As part of the project, there will be 18 outreach events and 10 CRLA pilot classes conducted in the community with a focus of reaching vulnerable and underserved communities. Based on the demographic makeup of those who participate in these events and trainings, we will be able to see which areas in our focus area we need to extend further outreach to. Additionally, there are common trends that existing outreach efforts do not always resonate and are not embraced by at risk, vulnerable communities. Future outreach events will be executed based on the feedback from participants and as a result we will be able to deliver outreach post-project in ways that are more accessible and applicable to those groups that were missed.

Long-Term Vulnerability

Resilience Hubs help build long-term vulnerability by building and sustaining resilient systems, communities, and critical infrastructure that reduce vulnerability to threats and hazards by lessoning the likelihood, severity, and duration of the adverse consequences. They provide a space for community support and resource distribution with the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve the local quality of life. Hubs contribute the opportunity to effectively work at the core of community resilience, emergency management, climate change mitigation, and social equity which are components that strengthen the city’s overall long-term vulnerability. Additionally, hubs allow the community to become more self-determined, socially connected, and successfully before, during and after hazardous or catastrophic events. A study done in Phoenix predicted that a heat wave coupled with a power grid blackout of at least two days would see half of the population suffer from heat-related illness and estimated 12,800 people would die. Phoenix and Tucson have comparable weather and power capabilities making these statistics relevant to the City of Tucson.

Performance metrics: Initial project work include identifying trusted, community embedded sites that can be transitioned into a Resilience Hub. Potential locations identified in subsequent reporting will be tracked. The project manager will include common themes that the identified locations have that the communities demonstrated were trust-worth sites they would utilize.

Estimated Capability Assessment after Project: Resilience Hubs are a significant priority for the

City of Tucson. This planning effort is only the beginning of the work that Tucson will dedicate to implementing hubs into the community. The recommendations and plan that are deliverables for this planning effort will guide the City on how to better incorporate community assets into our planning and response, especially those assets in vulnerable populations. Additionally, based on the statistics from the study mentioned above, Resilience Hubs integrated within the community, especially those that are more vulnerable and at risk, would impact the way we protect our community in heat waves and power outages substantially.

Housing

According to the Arizona Department of Health Services, between 2011 and 2021, 1,211 people died of heat inside residential homes. In 2021, approximately 84% of indoor heat deaths involved homes with a non-functioning air conditioner, the electricity to the home being turned off, or the occupant not using a functioning air conditioner. The risk of heat-related deaths within homes is one of the core drivers of the Regional Resilience Code. The code is intended to reduce environmental exposure and burden for all residents, including disadvantaged communities. As a result, disadvantaged communities will be directly engaged in the development of this code to ensure that it reduces these risks in a manner that minimizes energy burden and improves energy resilience in these communities. Additionally, Resilience Hubs would offer community members temporary shelter options in the case of a catastrophic event which is a component of the housing capability. For example, ACEEE found that energy burden in the Phoenix metro area, sister city to Tucson, ranged from 5.1% of households in single-family residences to 7.3% of households in low-income multi-family buildings. Energy burden among low-income families is 7.0%, but when coupled with age (65+) or disability, it rises to 8.3% and 7.3%, respectively. Energy burden is similar for owners (3.1%) and renters (2.8%) but is distinctly higher for Hispanic (3.6%) than white, non-Hispanic households (2.8%). The report does not include Tucson-specific data but the similarities in the two communities means that the same general patter would hold true.

Performance metrics: The Project Manager’s report will include the number of jurisdictions that participated in education sessions about the Regional Resilience Code, including whether any of them chose to become actively involved in the development of the code. Report will also include what capacity the identified community sites for Resilience Hubs can accommodate in the case that temporary shelter is needed.

Estimated Capability Assessment after Project: Post- project, it will be known how many jurisdictions adopt the Regional Resilience Code and will guide how to further engage other jurisdictions in the southwest. Currently, the City of Tucson operates six cooling centers within the community during extreme heat days/months during the day. Resilience Hubs would complement this effort by affording additional sites not only for additional cooling centers but also short-term shelter during incidents and events that may displace groups of people in the community.

Objective Breakdown

A high-level Objective Breakdown is below.

Objectives 1-3: Education, Planning, and Capacity Building

This project will subcontract out to multiple community organizations for engagement and planning support, and assistance with developing and implementing a community resilience education and capacity building program.

• Community engagement and planning process:

o 8 Community Resilience Ambassadors o Develop surveys and analyze results – done in kindly.

o 18 community workshops – embedded in the CRLA pilot

• Develop CRLA:

o Work with local, contracted organization to develop CRLA as detailed below:

▪ Develop CRLA modules, scripts, and presentation media

▪ Website concept and functionality

▪ Production of web videos of CRLA modules

▪ Collaboration and engagement with partners and agencies

• Pilot CRLA:

o Training presentation staff o Conduct workshops and facilitating community discussions o Food and supplies for each workshop o Participant stipends

• Community Resilience Contracts:

o Funds two projects o Contract local organization to support projects and community members.

• Develop Final Report and outreach materials:

o Design, translation, and printing services

Objective 4: Metro Area Hazard Mitigation Planning

• City of Tucson and Pima County staff will provide in-kind planning and coordination on

Hazard Mitigation

• City of Tucson will invite experts who are willing to provide in kind support

• Education sessions for Tucson metro emergency managers for information sharing

Objective 5-6: Regional Collaboration and National Dissemination

• Outcomes and final report will be shared with local, regional, state, and federal partners