The Environmental Collaboratory
Emergency Preparedness

Regional Convening for Community-Level Preparedness for Increasingly Severe Weather 

First Annual Convening: January 2025

The goal of the first annual regional convening in 2025 was to identify community-level priorities and needs for climate emergency preparedness and recovery, formalizing findings in a follow-up report that highlights gaps and priority actions. This report was written to guide deeper consultations and inform short- and long-term strategies and research to address the identified challenges. View the follow-up report here

 

Quote-gradient Collaborative, collective efforts are vital to ensure that our communities are prepared for extreme weather conditions. It inspires hope to see the cross-sectoral community that the Environmental Collaboratory and partners are convening to inform this urgent work.”
Katie Unger Baillie, Director, University of Pennsylvania Environmental Innovations Initiative

The event opened with remarks from Mathy Stanislaus, who framed the urgency of rising extreme weather impacts and reviewed insights from the pre-event survey, which asked participants to rank priorities and identify gaps in current preparedness efforts. To ground the conversation, the room featured a looping scene-setting backdrop video developed by Maya Hillis, offering stark context and statistics about the growing severity and long-lasting consequences of recent climate-driven disasters. 

The convening featured two keynote speakers who deepened this framing: Dallas Hetherington of C-Change Conversations, who highlighted climate change’s escalating threats to human health and security, and Chitra Kumar of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who discussed the state of climate resilience in Philadelphia. A multi-sector panel discussion followed, bringing together voices from environmental protection, emergency management, public health, and impacted communities to emphasize the need for clearer emergency communication and better use of environmental and health data to support public understanding and action.