EPIC helped the Cities of San Diego and Chula Vista develop a climate equity index. EPIC worked with the City of San Diego’s Sustainability Department to develop the first-of-its-kind “Climate Equity Index,” which was released in 2019 and updated in 2021. The index evaluates environmental, socioeconomic, mobility, and health factors across the city to help understand how climate impacts, benefits of related policies, and access to services are distributed. It measures thirty-five indicators for each of the city’s 297 census tracts. The selection of indicators was based on a stakeholder-driven process to identify communities with current equity concerns and develop a baseline climate equity index for the City and sub-areas of the City. These indicators cover a range of metrics considered important to the stakeholders that are related to climate change, such as flood risk, and also factors closely related to the ability to deal with climate change, such as the heat island effect, pedestrian access to basic needs, housing cost burden, and the poverty rate.
EPIC worked with the City of Chula Vista to develop a Climate Equity Index. The Index, which was released in 2021 and developed after the COVID-19 pandemic was underway, focuses more closely on health indicators based on the ongoing experience with the COVID-19 pandemic as lessons for dealing with climate change impacts. Therefore, access to health insurance, for example, became a new indicator as part of health factors affecting the ability to deal with climate impacts in the long term.