Community climate vulnerability, made visible.

The U.S. Climate Vulnerability Index (CVI) pulls together 184 measures of community health, income, housing, infrastructure, environment, and climate-related risks into one picture of how vulnerable each county is compared with every other county in the country. Scores run from 0 to 1 — a higher score means more of the conditions that make climate impacts harder to prepare for, withstand, and recover from.

One number can't say why a county is vulnerable, so each county report breaks the score into its categories and lists the specific measures pushing it up. The CVI was developed by researchers at Texas A&M University and the Environmental Defense Fund (Lewis et al., 2023); the full neighborhood-level tool is at climatevulnerabilityindex.org.

The Populations at Risk table describes who actually lives in a county: the share of residents who are older or very young, living with a disability, earning low incomes, without health insurance, without a vehicle or home internet, and so on. These are real percentages from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (compiled in the CDC/ATSDR Social Vulnerability Index, 2018–2022), shown next to the state and national figures so it's easy to spot where a county stands out.

The change column shows how each share has moved over roughly the past decade (compared with the 2010–2014 survey window). Life expectancy and food insecurity come from the CVI's own source data.