Federal datasets released by the U.S. Census Bureau and FEMA now make it possible to cross-reference the social vulnerability of any U.S. county against its expected annual losses from natural hazards, and the results challenge the popular idea that certain American cities qualify as climate “safe zones.” The 2024 Community Resilience Estimates connect American Community Survey variables across 10 topics to FEMA hazard-loss ratings, revealing that counties often promoted as havens still contain significant pockets of vulnerability. At the same time, the federal government is losing key tools for tracking disaster costs, raising the question of whether anyone can reliably score safety at all.
What the Census Resilience Data Actually Shows
The 2024 CRE, published by the U.S. Census Bureau, ranks counties and census tracts by combining social vulnerability indicators with natural hazard risk data drawn from FEMA’s National Risk Index. The underlying CRE datasets flag places that are both socially vulnerable and exposed to at least “relatively high” natural hazard risk, using ACS-based variables spanning income, housing tenure, disability status, and other demographic factors. That dual-layer approach means a county can look strong on one axis and weak on the other, a distinction that single-score “safe zone” lists routinely ignore.
FEMA’s NRI, which feeds into the CRE rankings, calculates risk with a specific formula: expected annual loss multiplied by social vulnerability, divided by community resilience. The agency’s published risk data include downloadable files in CSV, shapefiles, and geodatabases, along with metadata and a data dictionary for expected annual loss by hazard type. When researchers or journalists pull county-level CRE files and overlay them with NRI hazard layers, the picture that emerges is far messier than the tidy rankings that circulate on social media. A region with low earthquake or hurricane exposure may still carry elevated risk from flooding, extreme heat, or winter storms, and its resilience score drops sharply if a large share of residents lack health insurance, live in mobile housing, or earn below the poverty line.
Disaster Costs Keep Climbing as Tracking Goes Dark
The backdrop for any “safe zone” conversation is the accelerating frequency and cost of extreme weather events across the United States. NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information documented 2024 as an unusually active year for billion-dollar weather and climate disasters, with its analysis of billion‑dollar events spanning severe storms, hurricanes, flooding, drought, and wildfire. That work used CPI-adjusted figures to allow year-over-year comparison, and the trend line shows that billion-dollar events are no longer rare outliers but a recurring baseline condition. Regions that escaped major losses in one decade cannot assume the pattern will hold in the next, especially as compound events, such as heat waves during drought, become more common.
Making matters worse, NOAA decided to cease updates to the billion-dollar disasters database after 2024, according to reporting from The Associated Press. That decision eliminates a widely used public benchmark that insurers, planners, and journalists relied on to quantify the national cost of climate-driven events. Replacing the database will be difficult because some of its loss inputs were drawn from nonpublic data streams that outside groups cannot easily replicate. Without a centralized, federally maintained cost tracker, future claims about which places are “safe” will rest on thinner evidence, and private models will fill the vacuum with less transparency.
Private Risk Scores Hit Their Own Limits
The private sector has not fared much better at delivering reliable place-based risk information. Zillow removed its home climate risk scores, a move that, as Bloomberg noted, exposed the limits of flood and fire modeling at the property level. The deletion signals that even well-resourced platforms struggle to condense wildfire probability, flood-zone mapping, and heat exposure into a single consumer-facing number without oversimplifying or misleading buyers. Proprietary models may work reasonably well for portfolio-level risk management, but they become far shakier when translated into a simple letter grade or color scale for individual homes.
That retreat matters because millions of households have been making relocation decisions partly informed by these tools. When a major real estate platform pulls its risk layer, it does not mean the underlying danger has changed; it means the confidence interval around any given score was too wide to defend publicly. Families who moved to a supposedly low-risk metro based on a now-deleted score have no easy way to reassess their exposure, especially if local planners and insurers rely on different, incompatible models. FEMA’s National Risk Index remains available and documents its methodology openly, but it was designed for community-level planning, not individual home-buying decisions, and its risk formula depends on community resilience inputs that shift as populations change and infrastructure ages.
Climate Science Points to Widening Threats
The scientific consensus leaves little room for the idea of permanent safe havens. NASA and other research institutions have emphasized that scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal, drawing on ice cores from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountains that document centuries of changes in greenhouse gas levels and temperature. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report, particularly the North America chapter of Working Group II, synthesizes evidence on compounding risks from droughts, heatwaves, and coastal flooding with calibrated confidence language and extensive regional case studies. That assessment highlights how even inland areas that once seemed buffered from hurricanes or sea-level rise are facing heightened wildfire danger, riverine flooding, and extreme heat, especially when land use and urban design amplify exposure.
For planners and residents, the implication is that climate risk is dynamic rather than fixed. A county that currently shows modest expected annual loss in FEMA’s models could see its profile change as development pushes into fire-prone wildlands or as warming shifts storm tracks. The IPCC’s regional analysis stresses the importance of adaptive capacity (everything from robust health systems to social safety nets) in shaping how communities experience the same physical hazard. That aligns with the Census Bureau’s focus on social vulnerability in the CRE: two places with similar hazard exposure can have very different outcomes depending on who lives there, what resources they have, and how quickly they can recover.
Living With Risk Instead of Chasing “Safe Zones”
All of this suggests that the search for a perfect climate refuge is misplaced. Rather than hunting for a mythical county with low scores on every hazard, households and local governments are increasingly pushed toward managing risk in place and strengthening their own resilience metrics. Federal tools can still play a role: FEMA’s National Risk Index offers a starting point for understanding community-level exposure, while the Census resilience indicators reveal which neighborhoods might need targeted investments in housing, healthcare access, or transportation. But these datasets are best used as decision aids, not as definitive verdicts about where it is “safe” to live.
On the ground, resilience also depends on how quickly aid reaches people after a disaster and whether they can navigate the bureaucracy that follows. Federal assistance portals such as Disaster Assistance centralize information on grants, loans, and other programs, yet they presuppose that survivors have internet access, documentation, and the time to apply, conditions that may not hold for the most vulnerable residents highlighted in the CRE tables. As climate impacts intensify and some public datasets go dark, communities will have to rely on a patchwork of federal, state, and private resources to understand and manage their risk. The emerging consensus from both data and science is not that any place is truly safe, but that some places are better prepared, and that preparation is a moving target, shaped as much by policy choices and social infrastructure as by geography itself.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
