The Interactive Exposures, Impacts, and Strategies Inventory (EISI) Tool for Extreme Heat (EISI for EH) Project is a collaborative pilot initiative led by the Pala Band of Mission Indians (Pala), Prosper Sustainably, and the Public Health Alliance of Southern California. While tribes have a deep and long-standing understanding of how their climate and lands are changing, there are gaps in information that can make it difficult for Tribes to safeguard their communities from climate risks, and navigating the thousands of available Western science datasets can require more time and capacity than is available. This project represents a crucial step towards helping California Native American tribes more easily access and use available Western scientific information, alongside tribal ways of knowing, to assist their climate change resilience efforts. The project will focus on providing actionable climate, health, and community condition data to Pala as a pilot project that can then be leveraged and expanded to meet data gaps and needs of tribes in California to bolster resilience to the ongoing and increasing impacts of climate-driven extreme heat. This pilot project centers around the modification and integration of the EISI tool, a well-established mechanism for assessing climate-related risks, into an interactive and easily accessible module on the existing, freely, and publicly available California Healthy Places Index: Extreme Heat Edition (HPI: EHE) map platform. The EISI tool helps tribes braid both indigenous or local knowledge with credible, publicly-accessible, and “community-ready” Western science to identify and evaluate:
» Exposure (and secondary) to various climate conditions
» Potential impacts these exposures have on health and social, natural, and built environments, including highly valued community assets
» Community characteristics that influence a tribe’s sensitivity or adaptive capacity.
The HPI: EHE empowers communities to build healthy, resilient neighborhoods and supports informed adaptation decision-making through a variety of methods, including the ability to: » Locate neighborhoods with high exposure to extreme heat
» Identify vulnerable populations in those neighborhoods » Access resources to build resilience to extreme heat
» Prioritize the delivery of resources and programs to neighborhoods that need it most
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Prepared By:
Pala Band of Mission Indians