A new capability to identify urban neighborhoods, down to the block and building level, that are most vulnerable to climate change could help ensure that mitigation and resilience programs reach the people who need them the most.

This method developed by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory builds from environmental justice research—a key aspect of the federal government’s strategy to manage the adverse effects of climate change. But until now, scientists had limited tools to assess and ultimately predict socio-economic risks in environmental events, particularly when multiple forms of vulnerability interact with each other.

“Climate modelers are very good at telling us exactly when and where bad things are going to happen in the physical world. But we also have to think about where the people are,” said ORNL’s Christa Brelsford. “Most of the world’s population live in cities. In order to analyze climate risk, we have to think about impacts and vulnerability — and there’s a lot of vulnerability in an urban environment.”

ORNL project lead Nagendra Singh said climate modeling has mostly focused on “where things like a one-degree temperature increase will happen, or where there’s going to be more heat waves in our climate models. But we have not stressed the fine details of those impacts — how climate events will disproportionately impact different communities. Applying this geodemographic data to the models is a good approach to generating the information needed by decision makers.”