Balancing Need with Numbers: A GIS-based Approach to Mapping Population Health Vulnerability to Climate Change

Climate-mediated hazards are unevenly distributed across the landscape in extent, intensity and duration. Similarly, the distribution of human population that will be exposed to these hazards varies across space as does the constellations of characteristics that make individuals more susceptible and vulnerable to the effects to these hazards. Climate change will result in a shift in the extent, intensity and duration of climate-mediated hazards resulting in the exposure of new, and potentially vulnerable, populations to hazard impacts and the consequential health risks.

Given the critical role that vulnerability assessment plays in managing the health risks associated with climate-mediated hazards, decision makers need effective tools to locate and prioritize vulnerable segments of the population to more efficiently build their adaptive capacity and allocate resources. Ideally, these tools will provide information with a high spatial resolution to empower decision making at a sub-county level, integrate data from the numerous sources and geographies necessary to generate the nuanced information necessary to guide decisions making, and be scalable to both empower a single jurisdiction and enhance collaboration between multiple jurisdictions.

This presentation introduces a GIS-based technique to map population vulnerability through the calculation of vulnerability indices to specific hazards from multiple data sources and geographies that focus on single or multiple jurisdictions. Using the technique, these indices are subsequently downscaled via the introduction of high-resolution population density data to produce a map that differentiates vulnerability distribution at a sub-county level and is capable of identifying and prioritizing neighborhood-level need.