The CASAschools Github Organization was created to host code to be submitted with partial satisfaction of the Master of Environmental Data Science (MEDS) Capstone Degree requirements for the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, University of California, Santa Barbara

To view the project proposal and detailed technical documentation, please visit https://bren.ucsb.edu/projects/climate-hazards-data-integration-and-visualization-climate-adaptation-solutions

To view the California Schools Climate Hazards Dashboard, please visit https://shinyapps.bren.ucsb.edu/CASASchools/

The CASAschools team consists of:

MEDS students: Liane Chen, Charlie Curtin, Kristina Glass, and Hazel Vaquero

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Simone Pulver

Clients: Dr. Sarah Anderson & Dr. Danielle Harlow

Community engagement in planning is essential for effective and just climate adaptation. Unfortunately, traditional forms of soliciting public input often do not generate productive community engagement in historically underserved communities, and establishing trust through new community organizations can take years (Few et al. 2007; Klenk et al. 2017). The Climate Adaptation Solutions Accelerator (CASA) through School-Community Hubs project identifies the 10,008 public and charter schools serving Kindergarten through Grade 12 students in California as promising sites for building community engagement and capacity for climate adaptation. Effective climate adaptation has to be grounded in an understanding of local vulnerabilities to climate hazards. To serve as community hubs for climate adaptation planning and activities, schools need information about the intersecting threats that climate change poses, including wildfire, heat, flooding, and other hazards. In the project, MEDS students generated one final and three intermediate deliverables:

Final Deliverable:

• An interactive dashboard summarizing five climate hazards, including extreme heat, wildfire, extreme precipitation, flooding, and sea level rise at the school-community level. The dashboard provides locally specific historical data and future projections for each hazard. In addition, the dashboard provides a hazard summary score for each school. A user guide and information on adaptation measures are also provided.

Intermediate Deliverables:

• A catalog of the technical specifications of relevant California climate hazard data, all California school locations, and a school district boundary layer.
• Development of a hazard summary metric and visual representation of compounding climate hazards at the school district level.

The interactive dashboard will be used by teachers, administrators, students, and community members to learn about climate hazards their school districts face. Results of the proposed project will contribute to a pilot project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), CRISES: Climate Adaptation Solutions Accelerator (CASA) through School-Community Hub.

This organization is split into two repositories:

1. Climate Hazards: Detailed composition on the data prepping and analysis of the climate hazards and hazard summary metric.
2. Interactive Dashboard: Code for development and deployment of Shiny Dashboard

Few, Roger, Katrina Brown, and Emma L Tompkins. 2007. Public participation and climate change adaptation: avoiding the illusion of inclusion. Climate Policy 7 (1):46-59.

Klenk, Nicole, Anna Fiume, Katie Meehan, and Cerian Gibbes. 2017. Local knowledge in climate adaptation research: moving knowledge frameworks from extraction to co‐production. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 8 (5):e475.

We would like to thank Sam Csik for teaching the Shiny Dashboard workshop and providing a foundation to build our dashboard. We would also like to thank the Western Wildfire Resiliency Index, the Southern California Public Health Alliance, Cal-Adapt, CalMatters, and the Ventura County Public Health Department for their feedback and providing us with data as we developed our products. As well as the Capstone Commitee team including Dr. Carmen Galaz García and the MEDS team.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal.