About the US Climate Resilience Map

Across the globe, climate-driven natural disasters are increasing in intensity and frequency. The United States is far from immune to these impacts – big and small communities alike are burning, flooding, and overheating due to rising temperatures. While the public is increasingly aware of the broader impacts of climate change, the nearer-term and closer-to-home effects of a changing climate are not in full focus. If implemented effectively, on-the-ground interventions can reduce the impacts of these events by protecting people and property – making these communities more resilient.

The Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht – Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center has developed and deployed a visualization tool that will help make people and communities more resilient by offering a path forward for cities by sharing proven solutions to address their climate risks and social vulnerabilities. The icons on the interactive map feature ten cities across the United States that successfully implemented resilience-building interventions. This map uniquely highlights best practices that are helping reduce climate risks in cities and can help cities identify their opportunity areas where these interventions can be applied and scaled.

About the Data

The US Climate Resilience Map: Pathways for City Solutions employs existing, open-source data collected from a variety of public sources. The data layers are organized into two categories, (1) climate risks and (2) social vulnerabilities. The climate risk layers include coastal flood risk, drought risk, extreme heat days, extreme precipitation days, riverine flood risk, and wildfires. The social vulnerability layers include fifteen layers grouped into sub-layers and four main layers, socioeconomic status, household composition and disability, minority status and language, and housing type and transportation.

All the climate risk layers have been downscaled to match the original spatial granularity levels of social-vulnerability layers. These levels include the following geographic subdivisions: States, Counties, and Census tracts.

Rankings

We ranked Census tracts within the entire United States against one another, for mapping and analysis of relative risk/vulnerability in multiple states, or across the U.S. as a whole. Tract rankings are based on quantiles. Quantiles are cut points dividing the range of the data into contiguous intervals with equal probabilities. In this particular case we use quintiles to divide the datasets into 5 subsets of (nearly) equal sizes. To each of these subsets we assign a risk/vulnerability category, namely: Low, Low–medium, Medium, Medium–high, High. In the legends we display the corresponding raw indicator value ranges of each category.

Citations