On Sept. 3, Headwaters Economics unveiled a new, updated version of Neighborhoods at Risk — a free, interactive data tool that provides neighborhood (census tract) level information for every community and county in the United States about potentially vulnerable people and property due to climate change. Funded in part by CPO’s Communication, Education, and Engagement (CEE) Division, the tool offers maps, annotations, and downloadable reports that describe the socio-economic characteristics of potentially vulnerable neighborhoods. Users can also find community-level climate projections for temperature and precipitation over the next 70 years.
Climate change will not affect all people or communities equally. Neighborhoods at Risk helps planners and decision-makers see where potentially vulnerable people and climate impacts are likely to intersect. The tool can help inform capital improvement plans, vulnerability assessments, land use and policy decisions, hazard mitigation plans, etc.
Data are available for all U.S. cities and counties. Neighborhoods at Risk reports data from FEMA, Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium, First Street Foundation, and the Northeast Regional Climate Center’s Applied Climate Information System. Socioeconomic data are continuously updated with the latest available data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
“The Resilience Ecosystem grants from CPO and the Climate Resilience Fund came at a strategic time,” said Patty Gude, Associate Director of Headwaters Economics. “We had piloted Neighborhoods at Risk with city partners and were poised to make improvements in the tool and scale it up to a national level. The CEE grant made it possible for us to do it.”
Updates to this tool were funded in part by CPO’s Communication, Education, and Engagement Division via the Fiscal Year 2019 CPO Notice Of Funding Opportunity as a part of the Climate Resilience Ecosystem’s public-private partnership to scale up and accelerate the pace of climate adaptation in the United States.
