Severe weather and other natural disasters related to global climate change can cause the release of hazardous substances and mobilize legacy contamination from sites that manufacture, treat, and hold hazardous substances. If this occurs, communities must attempt to respond to the human health risks of contamination as well as property and infrastructure damage. This confluence of impact pathways requiring attention causes a compounding effect where the whole of stressors to community systems is greater than the sum of its parts. The Compound Risk Index (CRI) was created to meet a need for tools to prioritize hazardous site cleanup and reinforcement. The CRI value is based on the possible impacts of climate change, accounts for interactions with hazardous sites, and contextualizes this environmental risk information with community vulnerability. CRI was designed for large-scale applicability and repeatability, drawing from easily accessible national-level datasets. Testing the CRI metric on Glynn County, GA showed that the CRI allows for statistically significant identification of hazardous sites of concern as well as ranking of sites based on the risk that they pose to communities. This CRI metric may also be useful to local governments as they prioritize the cleanup and reinforcement of hazardous sites. In Glynn County, CRI data is being shared with local government officials and the public to motivate community conversations and resilience planning.
I developed my novel metric for ranking hazardous sites in collaboration with the Glynn County Environmental Justice Advisory Board and residents of the area. Once the data were created, I also developed three mapping web applications and a mobile community science application that communicated results with residents. These four tools were presented to community members at the Brunswick Healthy Communities fair in July 2022.
