Measuring changes in natural hazard risk with FEMA's National Risk Index

The National Risk Index developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency is a public website and comprehensive dataset that provides a relative measurement of community-level natural hazard risk across 50 US states and Washington, DC. The Risk 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 available at https://www.fema.gov/nri. During this session, the National Risk Index team will discuss updates to the foundational hazard data in our next data release, methodological updates to better estimate how sea level rise impacts the coastal flooding hazard, and how to measure changes in hazard risk over time.