The Reliance School

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In 2011, the CDC published the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) with the goal of projecting community disaster response.¹ The index underwent multiple updates and revisions over the following decade, but was taken down in January 2025 in accordance with Executive Order 14168.² The SVI appears to have been a casualty of a broader sweep targeting references to race, gender, diversity, equity, and inclusion across multiple agencies.^3,4

In February 2025, the website was restored by court order, stating that:

Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female. This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the Administration and this Department rejects it.¹

This statement makes little sense given that the SVI makes no reference to gender anywhere in its website, documentation, or in the full data set (which we’ve viewed in its entirety).⁵ We suspect that this is simply a boilerplate response, and that the removal of the SVI is part of a broader plan to censor and suppress research relating to racial diversity as outlined in the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership.⁶

While the SVI remains accessible on the CDC website, we’ve included it in our archive of climate data as this research is clearly in the administration’s sights and may be removed again. In this post, we’ve mapped this data so you can view the information at a glance.

Understanding the Data

‍The Social Vulnerability Index rates a community’s ability to prepare for and respond to crises, from natural disasters like fires and floods to human-caused disasters like disease outbreaks or industrial accidents.⁷

The degree to which a community exhibits certain social conditions, including high poverty, low percentage of vehicle access, or crowded households among others, may affect that community’s ability to prevent human suffering and financial loss in the event of a disaster. These factors describe a community’s social vulnerability.⁷

The SVI measures 16 social factors, which fall under 4 categories: socioeconomic status, household characteristics, racial & ethnic minority status, and housing type & transportation.

While most of those factors seem self-evident as indicators of vulnerability, racial and ethnic status might stand out as an exception. The CDC includes this category as minorities often face more risk exposure in emergency scenarios:

People from different ethnic and language backgrounds are sometimes more vulnerable in a disaster due to a number of challenges, including language barriers, cultural perceptions, social isolation, poor assimilation with the local community and distrust of authorities.⁸

Another study states that:

African Americans and Latinos are more likely to experience physical hardships and trauma during and after a disaster, including personal loss, damage to property, and delay in restoration of utility services, such as electricity and water, and other basic resources including food, shelter, and income. African Americans and Latinos may also have increased risk of adverse mental health outcomes post-disaster, including posttraumatic stress, depression, and panic attacks.⁹

The SVI assigns a value to each category, which is equivalent to a percentile ranking:

For example, an SVI ranking of 0.85 signifies that 85% of counties in the nation are less vulnerable than the county of interest, and that 15% of counties in the nation are more vulnerable.¹⁰

‍All risk categories are then averaged together (with equal weighting) to create a final vulnerability ranking. So without further ado, let’s take a look at these rankings on the map.

Overall Vulnerability

While there are scattered exceptions, the highest levels of social vulnerability are concentrated in the southeastern and southwestern United States, specifically North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Missouri, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska also have higher vulnerability ratings, albeit to a lesser degree than the states listed above. All four factors generally follow a trend of higher vulnerability in the southern United States, although socioeconomic status and racial & ethnic minority status are more strongly correlated.

To help show how these factors contribute to overall vulnerability, we’ve created maps for each individual category below.

Socioeconomic Status

Household Characteristics

Racial & Ethnic Minority Status

Housing Type & Transportation

The SVI is a component of the FEMA National Risk Index (NRI) and Future Risk Index (FRI), the latter of which we’ve mapped here. We’ve also compiled over 50 maps of climate risk in our free collection, which you can access here.

Footnotes & References

1. Social Vulnerability Index (CDC)
2. Confronting federal censorship of social vulnerability index (Shuo Jim Huang, Rozalina McCoy, The Lancet Regional Health)
3. Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government (National Archives Federal Register)
4. CDC webpages go dark as Trump targets public health information (Carter Sherman, Jessica Glenza, The Guardian)
5. Methodology (CDC)
6. Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership (The Heritage Foundation)
7. CDC/ATSDR SVI 2022 Documentation (CDC)
8. Engaging residents from different ethnic and language backgrounds in disaster preparedness (Melissa Teo, Ashantha Goonetilleke, Kaveh Deilami, Alireza Ahankoob, Marion Lawie, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction)
9. Disaster Impact Across Cultural Groups: Comparison of Whites, African Americans, and Latinos (Tatiana Davidson, Matthew Price, Jenna McCauley, Kenneth Ruggiero, American Journal of Community Psychology)
10. SVI Frequently Asked Questions (CDC)