View descriptions of each hazard on the Toolkit's Hazards page »
Understand Exposure
- Assets include the people, infrastructure, natural systems, and intangible resources your community wants to protect.
- Hazards are events or conditions that could injure people or damage assets.
- Exposure occurs wherever assets and hazards overlap. Any asset that exists in a place where it could be harmed is exposed to that hazard.
To understand your exposure to weather and climate-related hazards, complete an exposure matrix, indicating which hazards could harm each of your assets.
Steps to Resilience:
This content supports the highlighted step.
Identify the things your community cares about
Make a detailed list of the people, infrastructure, and natural systems—collectively referred to as assets—that your community depends on to keep functioning. The tangible and intangible things that power your economy and make your neighborhood, community, or city special are your assets.
Prompts to help you recognize your community assets
- What natural features, historic sites, schools, tourist attractions, or retail centers are part of the community?
- Which industries and companies support a significant number of jobs in the vicinity?
- What transportation infrastructure (roads, bridges, ports, light rail, etc.) do people depend on to move traffic and goods into, out of, and through the community?
- What events draw visitors to your community?
Note that you can group multiple assets together for this task. For example, you might group all commercial properties in the downtown area together, or consider all city-owned properites as a single asset. If some of your assets are more important than others, or they stand out as more likely to be damaged than others, you can list them singly. The Community Asset Themes Worksheet » can help you choose categories for characterizing your assets.
List the climate-related hazards you could face
Any event or condition that could result in damage to your assets is a potential hazard.
To zero in on weather and climate-related hazards for your location, use the links below to check what types of events have caused damage in your region in the past. You'll also add the hazards that might damage your assets in the present to your list, and finish by entering hazards that could occur under climate conditions projected for your location in the future.
What hazards have occurred in your region in the past?
Draw on local knowledge, newspaper archives, online databases, and other documents to identify extreme weather events that occurred within your region in the past. Capture a few sentences about each event, including the impacts it had and an estimate of the costs it incurred.
Explore past storms in the Storm Reports Database »
What hazards might occur over the next decade or so?
Check if climate trends suggest that hazards such as heat waves, drought, or flooding are increasing in your region. List any additional hazards your community may face in the next decade.
View climate trends in State Climate Summaries »
What hazards might you face over the next several decades?
As temperatures rise and precipitation patterns change over this century, what other hazards might occur in your region? List the hazards that could occur under new conditions projected for the future.
Check current and future exposure in the Climate Mapping for Resilience and Adaptation portal »
Could rising sea levels impact your region?
As global sea level rises, will it inundate land or infrastructure in your region? If so, describe the frequency and depth of coastal flooding projected for the future.
Check future shoreline locations in the Sea Level Rise Viewer »
Vocabulary Reminder
Assets are the people, infrastructure, and ecosystems that your community wants to protect.
Hazards are events or conditions that could injure people or damage assets.
Exposure occurs wherever assets and hazards overlap. Any asset that exists in a place where it could be harmed by a hazard is exposed to that hazard.
Complete an exposure matrix
Groups who have completed an exposure matrix report that the exercise helped them move from vague concerns about how climate change might harm them to a finite list of potential problems they may be able to address.
Use the example below to build your own matrix. List your community assets in the first column on the left. Across the top row, enter the hazards that could occur in your location. Consider each asset in your list, one row at a time. Put an X in the box under any hazards that could harm the asset in that row.
Example exposure matrix, where “X” indicates the asset on the left is exposed to the hazard in that column.
Imagine and describe potential consequences
For each exposed asset in your matrix, think about the range of impacts that could happen if a minor, moderate, or major version of the hazard occurs.
Capture clear descriptions of the potential consequences for each asset at varying intensities of the hazard. Use the descriptions you captured of past events to ground these imagined impacts in reality. These descriptions can serve as warnings about what could happen to your community's valued assets. The opportunity to help avoid these impacts may motivate individuals and groups to join your efforts.
Recognize the role of stressors
Conditions that make hazards more frequent or severe are called stressors.
- Climate stressors include changes in the frequency or severity of extreme weather events. These changes occur due to natural climate variability (i.e. episodes of El Niño and La Niña) as well as through human-caused climate change.
- Non-climate stressors include changes in land cover (for instance, when natural vegetation is cleared and replaced with roads and buildings), construction projects that disrupt natural water drainage or common traffic patterns, and population growth.
If one of your potential hazards is becoming more severe or occurring more frequently, or changes in your local environment could make the impact of a hazard worse, your risk—the probability of a expensive negative consequence—is likely increasing.
Decision point
If any of your important assets are exposed to climate-related hazards, continue to Assess Vulnerability & Risk »
You may find it useful to download and complete this prepared spreadsheet to record input as you move through the steps.
Access the Glossary for definitions and examples of words related to resilience.
Last modified:
10 May 2024 - 9:30am
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