STAY COOL MISSOULA

​Stay Cool Missoula is a collaborative group from Missoula County, the City of Missoula, and Climate Smart Missoula. The group was formed in 2023 with the intention of helping our community build resilience to rising temperatures we're experiencing across Missoula County.
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Communities that are resilient to extreme heat are those that have a robust emergency response combined with tools for building long-term adaptation for community health, ecosystems, and infrastructure.

Stay Cool Missoula offers a variety of resources for our community to be resilient to extreme heat. You can learn more about these efforts HERE and check out more tips for staying cool below!

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STAYING COOL DURING HOT SUMMERS​

Summer is often pleasant in Missoula, but we’re also experiencing much hotter days and warmer nights, thanks to climate change. When it's hot, take precautions and look out for each other, our kids, our neighbors and even our pets.

Check out our 2 minute video (right).

When it's hot, drink plenty of water, curtail exercise, seek shade, never leave kids or pets in the car, and check in on your neighbors, especially older adults.

To address extreme heat, we need to plan and build a future better suited for hot summers, with cool places to go, abundant shade, comfortable homes, and lots and lots of water. In June 2024, we released a collaborative county-wide Heat Toolkit, the first plan to help our community prepare for and respond to extreme heat. Explore this new resource via our Climate Ready Missoula website HERE.

​For more about the science and changing summers, click HERE.

VIDEO: How to "Weather" the Summer Heat

If the above film does not load automatically, download here. Worth it!

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More heat resources:

Health Risks + What You Can Do

Staying Cool

building + growing shade

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Resources & Recommended Reads

• Rural Residents May Not Be Ready for Increasingly Intense Heat Waves: Montana Public Radio
• NIHCM Foundation: Climate Changes Health: Extreme Heat, interactive infographic
• The US Govt has a new integrated heat health website: HEAT.GOV
• GRIST: As a heat wave grips the US, lessons from the hottest city in America
• CDC: excellent extreme heat guidelines  ​
• CLIMATE ONE podcast: Extreme Heat the Silent Killer
• Climate Signals: Climate Change and Heat Waves
• New York Times: One Third of heat deaths related to climate change 
• GRIST: Heat waves can be life-threatening - for more reasons than one
• NPR: How to stay safe and cool in extreme heat

More

• How Urban Heat Islands threaten public health from Grist
• Half the world could see deadly heat waves by 2100 from Climate Central
• Heat Risk from the National Weather Service.
• Heat Island Community Actions Database, from the EPA.

Help create cooler homes for all Missoulians! 

We need to improve sub-standard housing, build more affordable housing, and improve the efficiency of all our buildings.

And of course, join in the effort to find climate solutions from the local to the global scale. We can adapt only so much to a warming world.

Learn more about our collaborative Building(s) for the Future work. 

building(s) for the future effort

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