How are changing weather patterns affecting you, your family, and your community? The State of Oregon wants to know.

Planners with the State of Oregon wants to learn more about how our changing weather patterns affect you, your family, and your community. What parts of your life or livelihood are threatened? What in your life or community will need to change in the face of extreme weather events? How are your children’s’ lives affected? What opportunities might arise? What support might you need to take advantage of them?

The Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD) invites you to attend one of six interactive, public workshops to explore these questions.

At each three-hour workshop staff will provide a summary of how weather patterns are changing in your area. These changes include an increase in the number of hot days, changes in rainfall timing and amounts, reduced snowpacks, and more days with wildfire smoke. Then, workshop participants will engage in hands-on activities intended to encourage conversation and storytelling about how these changes will affect you, your family, your work, and your community. Families are welcome to attend. Light refreshments will be available.

“These workshops will help us better understand how a changing weather patterns affect the people who live, work, and play in Eastern Oregon. No scientific model can tell us this; we need to hear from people directly,” said Christine Shirley, project manager.

Meeting facilitators will document community ideas and themes shared during the workshops. Responses also will be collected from those who participate online. Staff will utilize information collected at workshops and online to help state agencies allocate resources to and select projects that support the lives and aspirations of Oregonians in the face of a changing climate.

Although organized by staff from DLCD, these workshops are being hosted on behalf of multiple state agencies. The Oregon legislature funded this project to learn more from communities about Oregon’s climate vulnerability and needs. Oregon's legislators are a primary audience for this information.

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Oregon’s Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment is a multi-agency effort to better understand how climate change affects people.

The climate is changing, and Oregonians must change with it. The purpose of the climate change vulnerability assessment is to better understand how to support all Oregonians during this time of change. The Department of Land Conservation and Development will accomplish this by providing people in all regions of the state with opportunities to tell us how climate change is, or might affect, their well-being, livelihoods, and community. State agencies will use this information when they develop or modify state policy, programs, and projects in response to climate change.

Meeting details: