February 2022 Tips & Taglines

Sustainable Emergency Preparedness Tips & Taglines

FEMA Region 3 is excited to promote preparedness strategies that embrace a more sustainable lifestyle.

Our goal is to provide tools that everyone can use and share to spread the message. We are always open to any feedback or suggestions. These DIY tools will always be synchronized with ongoing seasonal preparedness themes throughout the year.

Practice Sustainable Dietary Habits

• Consider how your dietary habits contribute to the way we interact with our planet. By shopping locally and thinking critically about our food waste, we can tweak our choices in ways that pay major dividends.

• Composting: A great way to reduce waste while provide nutrients to your home or local gardens is to compost your food waste. Considering checking out the Environmental Protection Agency’s Composting At Home page for useful tips on composting.

Reduce Your Electricity Intake

See how you can cut back on your energy consumption and make your utility bills cheaper and more sustainable. It may also qualify you for tax savings.

• Check out the Department of Energy’s Estimating Appliance and Home Electronic Energy Use calculator to get a good idea of how much energy you’re using.

• Switch to energy efficient lightbulbs such as LED: If every American household replaced a conventional lightbulb with an LED light, it would offset the greenhouse gas emissions of 800,000 cars.

• Unplug appliances that you aren’t using or invest in a power strip you can easily shut off. Items that are plugged in but not in use account for 5 to 10% of residential energy use and cost the average household $100 per year according to the Department of Energy.

• Set your air conditioner or heating unit on a schedule: You can save as much as 10% a year on heating and cooling by simply turning your thermostat back 7-10 degrees F for eight hours a day from its normal setting.

Sustainable Hobbies

• Find a way to make your route to work more sustainable. Consider walking, biking, carpooling or taking public transit.

• Gardening: The Public Broadcasting Station has an informative site on starting and growing your own garden (and some delicious recipes).

• Reduce Use of Plastic: Switching from single-use plastics to reusable containers can substantially reduce your carbon footprint, decrease the number of plastic particles found in our air and water sources, and will make you financially sustainable.

Financial Preparedness

We can also employ sustainable financial strategies; this keeps us nimble in case of disaster and sets us up with savings for the future. Consider employing the following financial strategies:

• Commit to saving a certain amount of money each paycheck

• Gather your financial and critical personal, household and medical information. Keep them in a fireproof and waterproof safe and keep a copy in your emergency kit.

• Obtain property (homeowners or renters), flood, health, and life insurance if you do not have them.

• For more helpful financial preparedness tips, download the Emergency Financial First Aid Kit (EFFAK) to get started with planning today.

Canning and Emergency Preparedness

Canning can be a low-cost and effective way to reduce your food waste and to extend the shelf-life of your food. Canning can also be an easy way to prepare for an emergency: you should always have 72 hours’ worth of food and water in your emergency kit.

Check out the Food and Drug Administration’s Canning Tips for more information.

Talking Points for Sustainable Emergency Preparedness

• Do your part to prevent worsening disasters by making conscious choices that do no harm or positively impact the environment in your day to day life.

• Encourage other people, businesses and organizations in your community to take steps to reduce negatively impacting the environment, to include reducing carbon emissions.

• Power outages and utility interruptions can occur at any time of the year and it may take from a few hours to multiple weeks for services to be restored to residential and commercial areas.

• Think of ways to have redundancy for important documents and money transferring.

• Learn how to grow and store more than 3 days of shelf stable meals ready to eat per person that can be quickly accessed, portable, and can sustain you and your family.

• Food scraps and yard waste together currently make up about 30 percent of what we throw away and should be composted instead. Making compost keeps these materials out of landfills where they take up space and release methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

• Sheltering is appropriate when conditions require that you seek protection in your home, place of employment or other location when disaster strikes.

Suggested Tagline Quotes

Add the below tagline to your emails to remind friends, family, and fellow business owners to prepare for emergency scenarios:

• “Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.” – Cree Indian Proverb

• “We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.”- Thomas Fuller, Historian

• “Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man.”- Stewart Udall

• “A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt

• “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.”- Native American Proverb

• “Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.” – William Ruckelshaus

Social Media, Photos, and Graphics

Social media, photos, and graphics for Sustainable Emergency Preparedness

Twitter

• #ReduceReuseRecycle

• Always have a backup! #WhenTheLightsGoOut have several batteries for your critical devices handy, bonus if they are solar powered! #SusPrep #Sustainability

• #DidYouKnow #Solar power can provide a portion of daily primary power as well as reliable backup power during an emergency? #SusPrep

• Make a #resolution to prepare for emergencies and leave a low-carbon footprint. Include reusable supplies in your kit with minimal packaging. #SusPrep #In2022

• Bacteria in food thrives in temps 40-140°F. #FightBac and keep perishables cold. #susprep

• Battery-stored backups can connect to #renewable solar panels and small wind generators to help the batteries stay charged during an emergency. #SusPrep #preparedness

• Candle warmers, chafing dishes, fondue pots, fireplaces have been used for #emergency cooking. How will you cook/eat during a #winterstorm?

• Store important docs in a secure, password-protected jump drive or in the cloud and have paper copies. #WhenTheLightsGoOut