Broward County's recently unveiled resilience dashboard is a home page of sorts for environmental resources and in-progress projects to fight the effects of climate change.
You can also search through tabs about clean energy, beach renourishment, solar power and projects happening in specific cities across Broward.
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Jennifer Jurado, Broward's chief resilience officer, calls it "a dashboard of dashboards."
She said she gets asked about homeownership the most in her job and, via the new dashboard's flood factor map, homeowners can look up risk specific to their property address.
"What is the flood risk that I have? Let me plug in my address. Let me assess how I compare relative to my neighbors. And if I see that there's a flood risk, what's my community doing in order to help mitigate that flood risk in the future?" she explained.
Jurado said the dashboard out now isn't the final product. The county plans to continue to add tabs and information in the future, including details about resilience projects in the private sector.
And the dashboard has other uses. Jurado said the county intends to introduce the tools to students in Broward's school system.
"This is the type of information that we need them to be thinking about. They are going to be a critical part of our workforce," Jurado said. "And the more that we can work with students earlier, that's going to help ensure that we have a much broader segment of our community that can be engaged with the solutions that we need."
There's two main ideas in the new initiative.
"The storyboard is intended to be able to tell that story to the residents about how each of these things: increase in rainfall, tidal flooding, ground water, table rise, flood risk ... how that relates to them," said Jurado. "It's a depiction of what climate risk looks like and how it affects various areas of our life in Broward County. Then we look at the Broward County resilience dashboard, which is more like the response."
Jurado credits County Commissioner Beam Furr for the idea to consolidate a place for Broward to keep track of its resilience projects and compile resources for the public. It was modeled after the county's coronavirus dashboard.
The dashboard will be accessible from the Broward County Environmental Protection and Growth Management website soon but, until it's there, you can access it here.
"That's how you can begin to then explore action plans," she said. "And what are the initiatives in their emissions inventory and energy investments? What does that like look like? How successful are we being in driving down emissions to [remain] consistent with our goals?"
