News from the EPA
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is providing Free hands-on assistance to water utilities to conduct Climate Resilience and Awareness Tool (CREAT) exercises to help you identify climate threats, assess risks to critical assets, and evaluate adaptation strategies. During these exercises, utilities will receive technical assistance in conducting their climate risk assessment from water utility climate specialists and subject matter experts. EPA uses real-time climate data specific to your location.
What’s Involved?
With each utility:
- We conduct a series of web meetings to review the climate/resilience goals, then step through the process using CREAT in screen sharing setup.
- EPA provides staff/contractor facilitation/experts to support the assessment steps.
- If possible, we conduct an in-person visit to review facilities and explore response strategies on-site.
- We have estimated that utility staff put in a total of about 35-40 hours of work over the 3-4 month project calendar.
- Optional participation in a workshop with other utilities in the region to share lessons learned and climate resilience best practices.
The outputs:
- Each utility gets a report documenting the exercise for their use (not an EPA publication, not shared beyond assessment team).
- Each utility has option to add to our Case Study map (https://epa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=03d35ca84b5944f8b3ab59bf3a981462), where our team authors the content and provides for utility revision/approval.
- Most utilities have accepted opportunities to share their experience at an EPA workshop or CREAT training in their Region, leveraging the exercise participants’ examples to help illustrate how CREAT supports their resilience/adaptation planning.
If interested, please contact Steve Fries at fries.steve@epa.gov to discuss participating.