Social and Heat Vulnerability Indices in Phoenix, Arizona

Vulnerability indices and maps are commonly employed by researchers and practitioners to assess hazard risk by combining variables that are theoretically or empirically associated with hazard outcomes and spatially visualizing those combined variables. For this dataset, we followed established methods to produce two vulnerability indices for 358 census tracts in the City of Phoenix, Arizona for the year 2016: the all-hazards Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI) and a specific hazards Heat Vulnerability Index (HVI). For SoVI, we compiled 27 social variables from the 2012-2016 American Community Survey (ACS); for HVI, we compiled seven social variables from the 2012-2016 ACS, one variable regarding residential air conditioning prevalence from the Maricopa County Assessor’s Office, and two variables related to vegetation density from Landsat 8 remote sensing imagery. Lastly, we conducted principal components analysis on each of the indices respective variables and then summed the resulting component scores for each census tract to produce the index values which we then spatially joined to the Phoenix census tracts.