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.