Assessing the climate vulnerability of communities across the U.S.

New tool combines two ICE metrics

Over the past year, ICE has developed a Climate Vulnerability Indicator, a tool focused on the intersection of socioeconomic factors and climate risk. The goal of the indicator is to quantify and model the current and future vulnerability of communities across the United States to multiple climate perils.

The methodology behind this new tool lies in the combination of two of ICE's existing metrics. The first is the ICE Social Impact Score, which combines demographic, socioeconomic, housing, education, employment, and health data from the U.S. Census, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to quantify the socioeconomic vulnerability of a community, town, school district, or any other geographically defined entity. The score ranges from 0 to 100, with 100 indicating the highest socioeconomic vulnerability.

The second set of components of the new Climate Vulnerability Indicator are ICE's physical climate risk metrics, including value-at-risk estimates for present and future hurricanes, floods, and wildfires, as well as heat and drought projections under the IPCC's Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 across the United States out to 2060.

This approach allows us to assess the percentage of the population within any given area that may be vulnerable to climate-related risks today-as well as the percentage of the population that is both at risk today and will likely be exposed to significantly more risk in the future. We refer to these measures of vulnerability as the "percent of the population currently vulnerable" and the "percent of the population that is both currently and future vulnerable." ICE's geospatial capabilities allow these Climate Vulnerability Indicators to be assessed for any geographic boundary within the United States.

Affluent and low income communities may often be equally exposed to the climate-related physical risks, but the Climate Vulnerability Indicator is not a measure of physical risk in isolation. It is instead designed to identify communities that are both exposed to high physical climate risks and also socioeconomically vulnerable. These are the communities that may often struggle to secure funding for climate adaptation projects and have more difficulty recovering in the wake of extreme weather events.

Figures 1a and 1b provide a visual description for how the Climate Vulnerability Indicator is constructed for communities across the United States. To assess present-day vulnerability, we find the areas of the country that are socioeconomically vulnerable and at high risk for at least one of these climate-related perils today.