California Climate Risk and Adaptation Index

Eagle Rock Analytics is developing a novel index to quantify the co-benefits of California Climate Investment (CCI) projects for the California Air Resources Board. The California Climate Risk and Adaptation Index (Cal-CRAI) is a co-developed measure to quantitatively evaluate connections between California-specific climate risk needs, resilience indicators, and adaptation efforts undertaken by communities. Cal-CRAI evaluates both community capacity (the ability to adapt to and recover from climate events) and hazard risk (exposure to specific climate hazards and associated historical losses from such events). The Cal-CRAI evaluates the following hazards: wildfire, extreme heat, in-land flooding, drought, and sea level rise.

CCI programs are designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while providing socioeconomic, health, and ecosystem benefits within disadvantaged and low-income communities across California. The Cal-CRAI incorporates a comprehensive range of socioeconomic, built environment, governance, and natural environment indicators, and generates a composite resilience index score that integrates these assessments. The Cal-CRAI can also provide agencies with detailed information to prioritize climate adaptation as a critical objective when designing future programs, planning projects, selecting grant awards, and more.

This work is supported by California Air Resources Board grant 22STC003.

Code publicly available: https://github.com/Eagle-Rock-Analytics/carb-climate-index

Conceptual framework of the Climate Risk domain, highlighting the Wildfire risk within Cal-CRAI. Each climate risk within the Climate Risk domain is characterized by two indicators: Exposure and Loss. Each indicator may comprise multiple metrics where appropriate to fully capture the indicator.
Four maps in a two by two grid. The top row of maps depicts California with each census tract shaded based on its hazard score (left map) and composite resilience to climate hazards (right map). The bottom two maps depict the same metrics, but provided specifically for Los Angeles County. Values of hazard score range from 0 to 1. Values of composite resilience range from 0% to 80+%.
The Cal-CRAI hazard score and composite resilience results for the “equal-weighting” scenario, where all indicators of natural environment, built environment, and socioeconomic factors are considered equally relevant for determining a community’s capacity to respond to a climate hazard. Hazard maps (left) depict the historical exposure to and losses from climate hazards. A low value indicates low exposure and historical losses, while a high value is a high exposure and occurrence of losses. Composite resilience maps (right) depict the Cal-CRAI score, where the higher the percentage, the greater the community capacity and overall resiliency. Subset maps for Los Angeles County are provided to highlight data availability at the census tract scale.