A Comprehensive Block-Level Socio-Economic Vulnerability Assessment of Hydroclimatic Hazards over the Contiguous US

The global increase in frequency, intensity and adverse impacts of hydroclimatic natural hazards on societies and economies makes it crucial to investigate associated vulnerabilities at regional to national scales. Despite considerable research conducted on this subject, current vulnerability and risk assessment at relatively coarse resolution carries significant uncertainty in the estimates. To address this challenge, we need to improve our understanding of socio-economic vulnerability at finer scales utilizing more data on relevant components. In this presentation, we propose a newly developed block-level Socio-Economic Vulnerability Index that helps characterize the spatial variation of vulnerability across the Contiguous United States. To develop this fine-scale index we have used socio-economic components available via FEMAs HAZUS Program. To conduct a more comprehensive assessment, in addition to the commonly used demographic and housing information, for each block, we have considered building count by occupancy and its distance to the nearest emergency facilities. To reduce the data dimensionality and identify the most influential components, we employed the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in estimating the block level vulnerability index.