HHS Unveils National Heat Strategy to Protect Communities from Extreme Heat
The Department of Health and Human Services announced that the federal interagency National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS) released its National Heat Strategy for 2024-2030 which will aid federal agencies in developing science-based solutions and improving resources, communications, and decision-making related to hazardous heat. The strategy is intended to facilitate proactive coordination by federal agencies around heat planning, response, and resilience.
Alongside the release of the strategy, federal agencies also announced steps that advance the goals established in the strategy, including establishing two new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Centers of Excellence to work with local communities on collaborative heat monitoring and decision-making, releasing the National Weather Service’s experimental HeatRisk tool that provides a forecast risk of heat-related impacts projected to occur over a 24-hour period, releasing the Center for Disease Control’s Heat and Health Index tool that provides ZIP code-level heat-related illness and community characteristics data to measure vulnerability to heat nationwide, coordinating NIHHIS-led urban Heat Island campaigns to raise awareness about urban areas that are warmer than the surrounding rural areas, holding regional heat workshops and heat tabletop exercises to simulate and evaluate local heat response efforts, and developing heat governance resources to allow local leaders and decision-makers to examine their capacity to manage heat risk.
NOAA also announced $200,000 in funding from the Inflation Reduction Act to support extreme heat preparedness and response planning. These funds will award prize money to up to 10 communities for developing manuals used to run simulated heat tabletop resources that will outline plans to bring together community-based organizations, tribal, local, state governments and other collaborators to simulate and evaluate emergency heat response efforts with a goal of planning for long-term resilience.
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