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Environmental Resilience Tools Wizard
Citation:
Maxwell, K. Environmental Resilience Tools Wizard. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, 2020.
Impact/Purpose:
Disasters can negatively affect human health and the environment. The Environmental Resilience Tools Wizard addresses environmental problems associated with disasters and homeland security incidents. It does so by helping build community resilience to disasters. While EPA has produced numerous resilience resources on various environmental topics, it is not easy for users to find the resource that meets their needs. Resources are scattered throughout EPA's online footprint, and the information about them is often laden with jargon, making it difficult for users who are not experts in a particular topic to figure out what will help them in their situation. The wizard contains a database of curated EPA resilience tools and resources, including characteristics about each resource (e.g. resilience application, format, audience, scale, specialized requirements). The research involved searching for, identifying, and categorizing the resources. as well as designing and developing the wizard. The wizard is intended to be used by emergency managers who need to address environmental aspects of resilience and environmental managers who need to address disaster resilience in their work, including EPA Regional offices, state and local agencies, and utilities. The significance of this product is how it helps translate technical information about individual tools into resilience applications for audiences who have diverse expertise and resilience interests.
Description:
The Environmental Resilience Tools Wizard is an online tool. It contains a database of resilience tools and resources, including characteristics of each resource. It also has an online interface where end users can use keywords or filters to search for EPA resilience resources that meet their needs. The filters are: audience, topic, disaster stage, and type of resource. After users input search terms, information cards for each relevant resource are presented on the screen. The information cards include: the title of the resource, its url, a description of the resilience application of the resource, what types of disaster(s) it applies to, whether the resource is open access or requires permission, and any specialized requirements for its use. The user can export results as a csv or pdf.