Keeping Our Cool with the Metropolitan Council: Extreme Heat Through Storytelling

Abstract

This project was completed as part of a partnership between the Metropolitan Council and the University of Minnesota’s Resilient Communities Project (https://rcp.umn.edu/). The goal of this project was to assist the Metropolitan Council in updating its extreme heat tool to include narratives that document extreme heat impacts on public health and natural systems, and demonstrate the equity and human health considerations related to extreme heat events. Metropolitan Council project leads Eric Wojchik and Ellen Esch collaborated with a team of students in Dr. Peter Brown’s course PA 8081 to provide a qualitative and human-centered focus on how extreme heat is impacting residents around the Twin Cities metropolitan area. A final student report and StoryMap website (https://z.umn.edu/MetCouncilExtremeHeat) from the project are available.