Your guide to NYC's public proceedings.
Q&A
Factors used to measure the Heat Vulnerability Index (HVI)
0:45:13
ยท
80 sec
Carolyn Olson explains the factors used to measure the Heat Vulnerability Index (HVI) in communities. She details the indicators used and how often the index is updated.
- The HVI includes both environmental and social indicators
- Five main indicators: surface temperature, poverty, access to air conditioning, green space, and race
- These indicators provide understanding of heat health impacts at a community level
- The HVI is updated when new data becomes available for all five indicators, with the last update in 2023
Lynn C. Schulman
0:45:13
What factors are used to measure the HVI in communities?
Carolyn Olson
0:45:19
Yeah.
0:45:20
I'll take that one.
0:45:21
So our heat vulnerability index is designed to look at community level heat health impacts and includes both environmental, like green space, as well as social, like access to air conditioning indicators.
0:45:35
There's a total of five indicators.
0:45:38
It also includes surface temperature, poverty, surface temperature poverty, access to air conditioning, and green space, and race.
0:45:49
And so together, they provide us with the ability to understand at a community level where we want to be prioritizing and where people have the greatest risk at, again, a population level for those heat health impacts.
0:46:05
How often is the hate vulnerability index updated?
0:46:09
Yeah.
0:46:09
We update it.
0:46:11
So those five indicators are all ones that are relatively slow to change and the data are not easy to collect.
0:46:19
So what we do is we update the analysis when there's new data available for all five indicators, and the last time we did that was in 2023.
0:46:28
It's included in our heat mortality report, and we can definitely send that to you if you'd like more information.