Community leaders throughout the Great Lakes basin make long-term management decisions that affect the environmental health of local resources and communities’ quality of life.
Protecting natural resources while enhancing community resiliency requires:
Through Tipping Point Planner, Great Lakes communities can plan sustainable futures by directly linking data to their local decision-making processes.
Our curriculum is designed for use by decision-makers who have oversight and management of ecological and land-use services, including:
The end result of this program’s facilitated process is an action plan that includes:
Trained facilitators enable both professional and civic participation in land-use planning and management, including maintaining projects using a HUC 12 watershed scale.
Participants in Tipping Point Planner will:
For example, the Tipping Point Planner decision support tool lets participants evaluate how proposed land-use changes may affect water quality or ecosystems. In this instance, they would choose critical action goals to sustain water quality and ecosystem integrity (such as reducing runoff) and action strategies to meet their goals (such as limiting or mitigating for impervious surfaces).
To explore the decision support tool, visit the Tipping Point Planner Website.
To develop a program that fits your community planning needs, contact:
Kara Salazar, AICP, PCED, LEED AP ND, Assistant Program Leader and Extension Specialist for Sustainable Communities
salazark@purdue.edu
Purdue Extension, Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant
Daniel Walker, AICP, Community Planning Extension Specialist
walke422@purdue.edu
Purdue Extension, Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant