The national risk index: establishing a nationwide baseline for natural hazard risk in the US

Abstract

The National Risk Index developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency provides a relative measurement of community-level natural hazard risk across 50 US states and Washington, DC. The Index leverages authoritative nationwide datasets and multiplies values for exposure, annualized frequency, and historic loss ratio to derive expected annual loss estimates for 18 hazard types and combines this metric with Social Vulnerability and Community Resilience scores to generate Risk Index scores for every Census tract and county. Scores provide a holistic and comparable measure of risk across the US. Risk scores and underlying data are summarized in a custom web application. Geographical and statistical processing techniques were used to reconcile incompatibilities between the spatial and temporal collection of input datasets. The index was developed using a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach and input from subject matter experts across disciplines and target users. The National Risk Index builds upon previous efforts to develop a multi-hazard risk measurement for a large geography by expanding the number of hazard types considered, applying extensive geoprocessing techniques to combine diverse datasets, and combining traditional risk factors with the community risk factors of social vulnerability and community resilience for an enhanced nationwide picture of risk.

Where, who, and what counts under area-based conservation targets: A framework for identifying opportunities that benefit biodiversity, climate mitigation, and human communities

“…To create an indicator of climate change risk inequity, we kept the same indicators used to measure climate burdens in CEJST: a community was classified as having climate inequities if it was within the 80 th percentile (as per EPA, see above) for expected agricultural, building, or population losses due to natural hazards (Zuzak et al, 2021). For an access to nature indicator, we intersected census tracts with the US Protected Areas Database (PADUS version 2.1, U.S.…”

Degree and direction of overlap between social vulnerability and community resilience measurements

“…A comparison of an initial set of FEMA indicators with BRIC [ 29 ], and a current report on the 20 modified FEMA-CRIA variables [ 30 ], highlights the comprehensiveness of 49 BRIC indicators and the distinguishing six resilience components in BRIC is instrumental for this study. Furthermore, the National Risk Index [ 31 ] also employs both SoVI and BRIC in their methodology, attesting to their prominence in the field and utility for emergency management and planning [ 32 ].…”

Spatial (mis)alignment between climate-related risks and risk perceptions across the US

“…Here, we examine the spatial patterns of (mis)alignment between climate-related risks and risk perceptions across the conterminous US and discuss how (mis)alignment may affect climate efforts in these places. We use public data describing countylevel US public perceptions of personal climate risk developed by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and derived via a multilevel regression with post-stratification on a national survey (Howe et al 2015) (figure 1(A)) and publicly available hazard risk data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency National Risk Index that quantifies and rates expected annual economic loss resulting from climate-related hazards (Zuzak et al 2021) for five major hazards (figure 1(B)): drought, heatwave, coastal flooding, riverine flooding and wildfire (figure 2) (Suppl. Mat).…”