ABSTRACT
Moving public and stakeholder audiences from simple awareness of climate change stressors in their communities to action on effective interventions to reduce those stressors relies on robust, detailed data as well as engaged residents and policymakers. This chapter describes a participatory urban climate knowledge-to-action (PUCKA) framework that both engages community scientists in an accepted methodology and provides practitioners and public stakeholders with detailed information about a particularly nefarious climate stressor: extreme urban heat. This framework was developed and adopted by the authors and a coalition of organizations from across the City of Richmond, Virginia, in July 2017, producing highly actionable, ‘civically legitimate’ data from which several demonstrable outcomes for climate change resilience have been identified. One such outcome has been the prioritization of the community science-identified urban heat hot spots in grant funding opportunities for the Urban and Community Forestry program at the Virginia Department of Forestry, enabling targeted investment in an effective intervention (urban canopy) to decrease extreme urban heat in the most vulnerable, frontline neighborhoods in the City of Richmond.
