These are heady days for locals who have dedicated much of their time and energy to making Sonoma County and Sonoma Valley better prepared to deal with climate change.

Sonoma Ecology Center’s Caitlin Cornwall is among them, part of the Sonoma County Climate Resilience Team in New York City today to be recognized by the White House for its efforts.

Caitlin and the team – which includes Sonoma County supervisors James Gore and Efren Carrillo, the Water Agency, the Regional Climate Protection Authority, and others – will be honored today for the team’s work on a new initiative the White House is helping to launch called Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness, or PREP. PREP brings government, business and nonprofit partners together to develop effective new tools for climate response, such as a dashboard for visualizing climate impacts at the local level. Because Sonoma County’s team is a national leader in climate adaptation science and response, Sonoma County is a pilot community for PREP. (We’re the only community in the PREP beta platform and the only local government represented in this launch.)

The New York event is part of Climate Week NYC, an annual confab on climate change that draws leaders from around the globe. Sadly for Caitlin (who has been tackling these issues since helping found the North Bay Climate Adaptation Initiative seven years ago) she’ll only get a few hours to check out the city as a tourist before heading home. There’s still a lot of work to do.