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Assessing risk starts with two key elements: vulnerability and exposure. Vulnerability looks at the potential for harm to a community and the individuals within it, which can be impacted by factors that range from age and prevalence of medical conditions to availability of transportation and language barriers. For instance, PolicyMap allows us to look at the percentage of residents who are over 65 years old, since this group has been demonstrated to be more vulnerable to health problems caused or exacerbated by heat.

Exposure, on the other hand, is related to location and whether it has conditions that make it likely to experience a particular type of extreme weather. For instance, California has higher exposure to wildfires than New York, while Florida is more likely to bear the brunt of hurricanes. Degree of urbanization and how cities are designed can also increase exposure since elements like dense concentrations of buildings and the presence of dark surfaces can trap heat and inhibit movement of cooling air. To help indicate where these elements may be most in play, PolicyMap can show us data like where parks are located or how many residents live in large buildings.

Ultimately, it is the combination of vulnerability and exposure that produces high risk. And, even when communities are both vulnerable and exposed, some are more resilient than others due to the availability of mitigating elements like strong healthcare systems or robust community resources. So, for example, we could use PolicyMap to visualize the locations of hospitals or health centers in our neighborhood.

These are only a selection of some of the data drawn from government and other high-quality sources that we can see by using PolicyMap and the program can be applied to explore many different issues related to social policy, public health, education, and more. Multiple elements can even be combined in one map for more complex analysis. So we encourage you to discover how PolicyMap may help you answer your research questions. For more on using PolicyMap data to look at heat waves, you can also check out their blog.