Safeguarding Worker Health and Safety from a Changing Climate:: Delaware’s Climate-Ready Workforce Pilot Project

Changing climate conditions threaten the health and safety of the State of Delaware’s most important assets: its workforce. Building on momentum at the state level to assess climate risks and implement relevant adaptation actions, five state agencies implemented the Climate- Ready Workforce Pilot Project to identify and safeguard at-risk workers from the impacts of extreme events such as storms and floods as well as extreme temperatures. Findings indicate that the five participating agencies have an important foundation of worker health and safety policies, procedures and practices. Enhancing their climate resilience will require both strengthening the fundamentals of current policies and procedures by improving processes for policy development, implementation, and enforcement, more explicitly incorporating climate considerations, and sharing agency good practices are key actions.