Project Context

In recent years, the U.S. federal government launched a range of tools designed to assist federal agencies in targeting resources and grant funds towards socially vulnerable communities. These tools added to an expanding landscape of vulnerability maps and indices that aim to help with identifying the spatial distribution of these communities and understand the drivers of social vulnerability within specific geographies. While the proliferation of tools indicated an important shift toward greater attention to the needs of disproportionately impacted populations, questions remained among personnel within government agencies and other organizations regarding how to most effectively utilize these maps and tools.

Project Purpose

In an effort to answer these questions, the Bill Anderson Fund and Headwaters Economics partnered to conduct a series of comparative spatial analyses that shed light on similarities and differences of three climate vulnerability maps and provide insight into appropriate uses. Specifically, these analyses examined the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Community Disaster Resilience Zones (CDRZ), the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), and Headwaters Economics’ Rural Capacity Map. Insights gleaned from this study have the potential to support decision making in ways that improve access to resources, including technical assistance, grant funds, and local match waivers, by diverse U.S. communities on the front lines of climate change.

Outcomes  

This project produced a blog post that presents findings from the first of three phases of research. The findings indicate that federal climate vulnerability maps overlook low-capacity communities, reflecting a gap in the allocation of federal resources.

The CDRZ and CEJST maps are designed to identify disproportionately impacted, at-risk, and in-need places that will benefit the most from billions of dollars intended for building climate resilience. However, the BAF research team’s analyses found that federal maps overwhelmingly intersected with high-capacity places compared to low-capacity ones, thereby potentially reinforcing legacies of disinvestment. Specifically, the federal vulnerability maps examined do not incorporate local government and community capacity to fulfill requirements such as application, staffing, expertise, and reporting, which are primary requirements to access federal funding.

The research team concluded that, as currently structured and designed, federal maps risk prioritizing the allocation of resources to communities that already have a competitive advantage. The findings indicate that redesigning federal vulnerability maps to incorporate capacity could help to identify the communities in greatest need, thereby enabling strategic prioritization of federal grants for community resilience.

The research team presented their findings in the June 2024 installation of the Natural Hazards Center’s Making Mitigation Work webinar series, which is produced in partnership with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. You can view the recording here.

Additional products will be shared here as they become available.

Project Team

Graduate Research Assistants: Tiffany Cousins, Virginia Tech, Bill Anderson Fund Fellow; Joseph Karanja, Arizona State University, Bill Anderson Fund Fellow 

Project Mentor: Mary Angelica Painter, Ph.D., Natural Hazards Center

Project Supervisor: Nnenia Campbell, Ph.D., Bill Anderson Fund

External Collaborator: Patty Hernandez, Headwaters Economics