Where to Live for Generational Survivability — US County Map

Every county in the continental US, Alaska and Hawaii, scored on five factors that matter over 50–100 years: water security, soil & food, hazard safety, where the climate is heading by late-century, and practical land access. Scores are built entirely from public federal datasets (see Sources below), not editorial judgment. Click any county or city for its full breakdown.

Click a county or city on the map to see its score breakdown.

Combined score = weighted average of the five factors below (Water 25%, Soil 20%, Hazard 20%, Trajectory 20%, Practical 15% — same weighting as the Great Lakes regional version of this map), rescaled 0–100 across all US counties.

Sources

  1. Hazard safety — FEMA National Risk Index, county composite Risk Score (inverted: lower FEMA risk = higher safety score here). FEMA's Risk Score is driven partly by total population/building-value exposure, so large metro counties can score as "high risk" even where day-to-day danger per resident is modest — worth keeping in mind when comparing a big city to a small rural county.
  2. Water security — FEMA National Risk Index, county Drought risk component (inverted). A proxy, not a direct measure of aquifer depth or surface water abundance.
  3. Soil & food — USDA 2022 Census of Agriculture, county cropland acreage, expressed as a percentage of the county's actual land area (computed from the boundary geometry itself, not a published area figure).
  4. 2050–late-century trajectory — FEMA's archived National Risk Index: Future Risk product (published Dec 2024, later taken offline by FEMA; mirrored here under its CC BY 4.0 license), averaging the late-century, higher-emissions (SSP5-8.5) projected hazard multipliers for coastal flooding, drought, extreme heat, hurricanes and wildfire.
  5. Practical — USDA ERS Rural-Urban Continuum Codes (2023) as the primary signal (land affordability/availability, scored so moderate rurality scores best and both a dense urban core and extreme remoteness score lower), combined with a secondary signal from the EPA Superfund National Priorities List site count per county (contamination-legacy proxy; matched to counties by state + county name, ~95% match rate).
  6. County & state boundaries — us-atlas (US Census TIGER/Line, simplified to 10m).
  7. Cities — Plotly's us-cities-top-1k dataset (US Census population figures), matched to their host county by point-in-polygon.
  8. Basemap — map tiles © Esri (World Light Gray), HERE, Garmin; map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.

Built from a one-time (periodically refreshed) data pull, not a live feed. Canada is not yet included — US-only for this version.