This team of Dow Sustainability Fellows partnered with Elevate, a Chicago-based nonprofit, to identify comprehensive strategies to support local climate planning and resilience building in the face of climate impacts in Southeast Michigan. The first phase of the project involved comparing existing municipal climate action plans and the Michigan Healthy Climate plan, identifying best practices and improvement areas. The second phase focused on the Resilience Eastside Initiative (REI) in Detroit, where the team used their research to develop a framework for defining resilience hubs and climate emergencies, covering extreme heat, flooding, winter storms, and air quality. The framework includes tiers of warning and action flow charts for each type of emergency. The next steps involve strengthening relationships among local resilience hubs, creating standard operating procedures, and conducting more in-depth vulnerability assessments for proactive responses to natural disasters.

Project Report