Why community reinvestment
Low-income households spend about three times more of their income on energy than others — roughly 6% versus 2% nationally per DOE's LEAD data, and past 30% in the hardest-hit tracts. The same places tend to carry older housing stock, higher climate exposure, and growing insurance stress. That overlap is the point of this atlas: targeted investment — weatherization, rooftop solar, electrification, flood hardening — cuts household costs, hardens homes against the hazards mapped here, and counts toward Community Reinvestment Act obligations when directed at LMI tracts.
Justice40-designated disadvantaged communities (the DAC tag on tract cards) are priority targets for federal co-funding, which can stretch private reinvestment dollars further. The Invest tab sketches what a budget could reach; the Outlook layer sketches what inaction could cost.
Data sources & vintages
FEMA National Risk Index (hazard risk & expected annual losses) ·
CDC/ATSDR SVI 2022 ·
CEJST 2.0 via PEDP mirror (Justice40 DACs) ·
ACS 5-year 2019–2023 (income, housing, demographics) ·
DOE LEAD 2022 (energy burden & cost; ACS 2018–2022 microdata) ·
NREL/NLR REPLICA (LMI rooftop-solar technical potential; 2015 LiDAR vintage, apportioned to 2020 tracts) ·
NLR Solar Resource & Utility Rates (county centroids) ·
Treasury FIO homeowners-insurance dataset 2018–2022 (ZIP, area-weighted to tracts; preserved copy — Treasury removed the original in 2025).
Climate scenarios: IPCC AR6 WG1 (warming pathways and extreme-event frequency scaling, Fig. SPM.6) ·
Knutson et al. 2020 (tropical cyclones and warming, BAMS) ·
Hauer 2017 (sea-level-rise migration, Nature Climate Change — destination-pressure anchor) ·
NOAA 2022 Sea Level Rise Technical Report.
Method notes
Subscores are national percentiles (0–100). The composite is your weighted blend — weights live in the Explore tab and are baked into shared links and CSV exports. LMI status uses the ACS state-income proxy unless FFIEC data was enabled in the pipeline. Climate outlook and investment scenarios are labeled illustrations with editable assumptions; neither is a forecast. Energy burden ≥6% is flagged high and ≥10% severe, following DOE convention. REPLICA solar potential is technical potential — suitable roof area — not economic or achievable potential.
Screening aid, not investment advice.