Standardization News

It is no longer news that the Earth’s climate is changing, but the rate of that change is still being studied. For reference, the goal of the UN’s Paris Agreement on Climate Change is to limit global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius and hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels.”

As challenging as many climate-related goals are, in addition, many believe climate impacts are being felt disproportionately by certain communities. In order to address this, it would be helpful for policy makers, local leaders, and residents themselves to have access to tools to quantify and measure impacts at the local level. However, the large variety of mapping tools currently available can make choosing the best tool a potentially daunting task, and there is a need for guidance on how to select the optimal tool for each individual’s requirements.

Enter the subcommittee on climate and community (E50.07), part of the committee on environmental assessment, risk management and corrective action (E50), which has proposed the guide for climate and community mapping. The standard designation will be E3460, but information can currently be found at WK76938. This guide aims to “facilitate a standardized approach for data-driven climate and economic justice screening tools to identify communities threatened by the cumulative impacts of climate change, racial inequality and multi-source environmental pollution.”

The guide aims to provide tools and protocols that assess the community benefits that could result from climate-resilient strategies, such as increased public health and safety, economic vitality, and strengthened ecosystem services.

The guide summarizes over 100 existing mapping and screening tools.

“We're increasingly seeing the effects of climate change on communities,” says Dr. Stephanie Fiorenza, an environmental remediation expert in Houston, TX and E50’s first vice chair. “This particular standard guide was developed because there are a lot of online mapping tools that people can use, especially those aimed at communities, to try and look at what kinds of climate risks might be in front of them. But while they seem easy to use, they rely on different sources of information and are queried differently, so you have to be a more sophisticated user to get value from them. We developed this guide to try to help people become educated users of these types of tools.”

The project dates back over three years and has incorporated input from a global coalition of public and private stakeholders across the climate and community world, including representatives from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), mapping experts, real-estate developers, and more.

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In order to address the needs identified in the standard, the guide summarizes over 100 existing environmental justice and climate equity mapping and screening tools to help stakeholders make better use of what is already available to them. The tools are organized into a table with summaries, geographic coverage, author information, and links to additional online resources, as well as comprehensive sections on how to evaluate the quality of the data used to create the tools and related assumptions. Case studies focused on brownfields grants, environmental justice and climate resilience investment, permitting, and enforcement highlight examples of how similar mapping tools have been employed to assess and provide community benefit.

However, that is just part of the solution. The guide is also intended to be interactive and includes an online Community Resilience Mapping Hub. Built in partnership with environmental consulting firm Haley & Aldrich, the hub classifies and organizes tools by risk factor, where users can select an area on the map and see directly how it is connected to various climate risks with data sourced from various climate-mapping tools.

“The rise of technology and GPS have introduced so many new resources that previously were not available to us,” says Barbara Maco, subcommittee technical contact and a sustainability expert with the environmental law firm Wactor and Wick LLP in Oakland, CA. “So there has been a growth in resources to address these problems and understand local impacts. But to build solutions, you need to know where to build and what kind of resilience measures to take in order to minimize the chances of a disaster happening again.”

Given the variety of tools available today, covering every aspect of climate and its related risk factors, the new Community Resilience Mapping Hub is designed to be comprehensive but also provide users with the information they need to make decisions at the local level, where they can have the most impact. It is about aggregating research and getting information into the right hands.
For instance, in 2024 following the flooding in western North Carolina, many Asheville, NC residents were surprised to learn that they were living in an active floodplain and weren’t fully insured to that risk factor given that lack of knowledge.

“One of the tools in our guide comes from a nonprofit that used more recent modeling to correctly estimate the flooding risk for inland rivers,” Maco says. “So property owners in North Carolina who want to rebuild can now use the guide to find the tools that were developed by that nonprofit, as well as some other mapping from the University of Texas, to make better-informed decisions.”

She adds: “It’s about finding the right map for your need.”

Tim Sprinkle is a freelance writer based in Colorado Springs, CO. He has written for Yahoo, The Street, and other websites.