Hurricane Resilience

Click here to access the Hurricane Resilience curriculum.

The South Louisiana Wetlands Discovery Center is happy to offer the Hurricane Resilience program to high school environmental science teachers and their students. This 20-day curriculum allows students to make connections between hurricane science and their coastal communities, including how these students can plan for a more resilient future. 

As of 2022, over 1,000 students from Lafourche and Terrebonne high schools have used this curriculum to explore how different storm characteristics relate to community members’ experiences in South Louisiana. Students begin the fall semester by interviewing local residents about their personal storm experiences. Students then connect these local stories with hurricane models of future storms to determine how these experiences may change as these storms change. Students finish the curriculum by creating resilience posters displaying possible strategies that will protect their communities into the future.


IMG_2772
South Terrebonne High School environmental science students study the impacts of tropical storms that have affected Terrebonne Parish in the past 100 years.


“The students really got interested in selecting places of value in the community and the discussion about how risk and vulnerability affected those places was great. Since so many of my kids are experienced with storms, determining what they felt was most important and addressing the needs of their families and communities was eye opening. It allowed me to see what they value and the issues through their eyes. It gave me hope that they will work hard to fight for our area and improve the quality of life that we lose so often in disasters.” -High School Environmental Science Teacher, Terrebonne Parish. 

“Hurricane Resilience provides our students the opportunity to interact with actual scientists studying climate data, but more importantly the opportunity to learn how these factors affect their community.  It is also important to me that our students are knowledgeable so they can make effective decisions as citizens whereby they can apply their understanding for being resilient in the future.” -Nathan Cotten, STEM Curriculum Specialist, Terrebonne Parish School District

Hurricane Resilience was funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations’ Environmental Literacy Program and is a collaboration between the South Louisiana Wetlands Discovery Center and the UCAR Center for Science Education. For more information about this program, please contact Samantha Hicks at shicks@slwdc.org.