U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit

Step 1: Understand Exposure

Exposure is the presence of people, assets, and ecosystems in places where they could be adversely affected by hazards. In this step, resilience builders are focused on evaluating community assets and their exposure to climate-related hazards. Evaluating community assets and their exposure to climate-related hazards involves confirming that all relevant potential climate impacts are being considered to allow for a comprehensive assessment of vulnerability and risk in the next step. This may require exploring multiple sources of information such as climate projections, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, community knowledge, observational data.

In Practice

• Identify people and community assets, hazards and stressors

  • Determine the community groups, places, natural resources, infrastructure, and services the community agrees are important to protect and document the conditions that could threaten them.

• Document potential impacts through an exposure matrix 

  • Review your conceptual model to determine if a hazard has the potential to impact a community asset.

• Inventory spatial, quantitative, and qualitative data

  • Practitioners can begin building an inventory of local, state, and federally available spatial datasets once community assets and hazards are identified. 

• Meet with the planning team to review Step 1 results

  • This meeting should include the full planning team, the community champion(s), and community members should be invited to attend to provide an overview of the hazards and community assets identified (including asset themes), and data collection progress. 

Assessment Questions

• Is the full range of stakeholder perspectives represented in identifying community concerns or people and community assets?
• What will future conditions look like for your location during the full lifecycle of the community asset?

Practitioner Guide Resources

• Step 1 | Implementation Examples
• Resource 1.1a | Systems Thinking & Conceptual Models 
• Resource 1.1b | Build a Conceptual Model
• Resource 1.1c | Community Asset Themes
• Resource 1.1d | Hazards & Stressors Research Guide 
• Resource 1.1e | Evaluate Hazards and Stressors 
• Resource 1.2a | Tools for Exploring Exposure
• Resource 1.2b | Potential Impacts Matrix
• Resource 1.3a | Sources for Spatial Data Collection 
• Resource 1.3b | Using the Spatial Data Collection Sheet 
• Resource 1.3c | Spatial Data Collection
• Resource 1.3d | Community Asset Types
• Resource 1.3e | Social Vulnerability Indicators 
• Resource 1.4a | Annotated Agenda: Step 1 Meeting 
• Resource 1.4b | Step 1 Meeting Slides
• Implementing the Steps to Resilience: A Practitioner's Guide