A joint project of the Public Health Alliance of Southern California and the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, the Healthy Places Index®: Extreme Heat Edition (HPI: EHE) is an interactive data and policy platform created to advance health equity and community resilience to extreme heat through open and accessible data.
Communities that are economically secure and have access to green space, healthy housing, and transportation can better prepare, respond, and recover from extreme heat events. Neighborhood-by-neighborhood, the HPI: EHE maps extreme heat projections alongside hand-selected measures of community conditions, adaptive capacity, and sensitive populations.
Using the tool, schools and school districts, government agencies, tribal organizations, and community members can locate neighborhoods with high exposure to extreme heat, identify vulnerable populations in those neighborhoods, and access resources to build resilience to extreme heat.
1. Visualize Multiple Vulnerabilities
This feature allows users to visualize the intersection of heat exposure and selected vulnerability indicators, which can help support heat mitigation and adaptation program planning, prioritization, and resource allocation. By selecting a heat exposure indicator and one or more vulnerability indicators, you can visualize where these conditions intersect – or stack. You can find the places where overlapping factors — community conditions, sensitive populations, adaptive capacity — increase vulnerability to extreme heat.
2. Resources to Address Extreme Heat
This feature allows users to identify programs and funding opportunities to address extreme heat. The resources here are organized by the potential recipient (e.g., households, workplaces, schools, local governments, tribal governments, and non-profits). For each resource, helpful icons describe the heat mitigation measure it can offer, for instance air conditioning replacement or repair, weatherization, solar PV, urban greening, and others.
3. Filter Indicators
The filter Indicators feature allows you to quickly find places that meet a specific criteria you set - like income level. This is especially useful when working with specific grant criteria. This feature can be used to filter multiple indicators at once.
Everybody deserves the opportunity for a long and healthy life, regardless of who they are or where they call home. However, we know that access to these opportunities is not equal across communities.
Where we live and the historic legacies of racism and discrimination experienced by communities of color — our racial and ethnic backgrounds — are strongly tied to measures of well-being and life expectancy — even more so than genetics. Decades of research have demonstrated how health outcomes are strongly tied to neighborhood environments and community conditions, which are, in turn, strongly linked to race. We also know that communities of color, and especially children of color, are disproportionately impacted by extreme heat events.
We created the HPI: EHE on the premise that lasting systems change cannot occur unless leaders, community providers, advocates and even residents themselves understand the critical relationship between place, race, and a person’s health outcomes.
But we know data alone is not enough to dismantle the legacy of racially driven policymaking. Our data works at its best when supporting the lived experiences and strengths of the communities at the forefront of social change.
Ultimately, the HPI: EHE data and resource recommendations are meant to support leaders, advocates, and community members to prioritize investments, resources, and programs in the neighborhoods most disproportionately impacted by extreme heat and health inequities.
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