Weathering Extremes: A Toolkit for Information Resilience Amid Disaster

Extreme weather events are fuelling dangerous mis- and disinformation in communities across the United States.

These crises can happen anywhere, as hyper-local events are weaponized by domestic or transnational actors.

The resulting chaos endangers lives and hinders local responses during a crisis, and has corrosive effects on policymaking and community resilience in the long term. It also threatens to undermine national security by disrupting critical infrastructure, empowering extremists and foreign adversaries, and paralyzing decision-making.

This toolkit positions information resilience as a key element of disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. It provides a model that combines upstream efforts to build readiness and trust architecture, with frameworks to triage and counter information threats when a crisis strikes.

It is designed primarily for emergency managers, resilience officers, and public information officers. In tandem, it details how a more expansive set of actors is needed to realize and embed outcomes, working across government at the state, local, and tribal levels.