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 How the scores are calculated), 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 (Water 25%, Soil 20%, Hazard 20%, Trajectory 20%, Practical 15%, the same weighting as the Great Lakes regional version of this map), rescaled 0–100 across all US counties. See How the scores are calculated below.
Every factor works the same way. We take one or two real, published numbers for each county, put all US counties in order from worst to best on that number, and split the list into five equal groups. The best fifth of counties gets a 5, the next fifth a 4, and so on down to 1. So a score is always relative to the rest of the country: a 3 means "middle of the pack nationally," not "moderate in absolute terms."
Ranking by position (rather than fixed cut-off values) keeps the five groups the same size even when the raw data has lots of ties. If a county is missing data for a factor, it gets a neutral 3 for that factor, and its detail panel says so.
The combined score is the weighted average of the five 1–5 scores (Water 25%, Soil 20%, Hazard 20%, Trajectory 20%, Practical 15%), stretched so the lowest county in the US is 0 and the highest is 100. The map colours split counties into national fifths on that combined score.
Source: FEMA National Risk Index (NRI), the county Drought risk score.
How: FEMA's drought score is a 0–100 national ranking built from expected yearly drought losses, adjusted for how vulnerable and how resilient the community is. Higher means more drought risk, so we flip it: the lowest-drought-risk fifth of counties scores 5.
Limits: FEMA counts drought losses mainly as crop losses, so this is a proxy. It does not measure aquifers, rivers, lake access, or water rights.
Source: USDA 2022 Census of Agriculture, total cropland acres per county.
How: cropland acres divided by the county's land area, which we measure directly from the county boundary shape (spot-checked against published areas, within about 1%). The highest-cropland-share fifth of counties scores 5.
Limits: this shows how much land is actually being farmed, which is a strong sign of workable soil and growing conditions, but it is not a soil-quality test. Irrigated desert farmland counts the same as rain-fed prairie, and forested counties with good soil can score low.
Source: FEMA National Risk Index, the county composite Risk score.
How: FEMA estimates expected yearly losses from 18 natural hazards (floods, wildfire, tornadoes, earthquakes, landslides, hail, winter storms and more) to buildings, people and crops, adjusts for community vulnerability and resilience, and ranks every county 0–100. Higher means riskier, so we flip it: the lowest-risk fifth scores 5.
Limits: FEMA's score measures total dollars and people at risk, so it rises with population and property value. A large, wealthy metro county can rank as high risk even when the danger to any one household is modest. Compare like with like (rural to rural, metro to metro).
Sources: FEMA's National Risk Index: Future Risk (published December 2024, later taken offline by FEMA; used here from the CC BY 4.0 mirror in Esri's Federal User Community), plus the current FEMA National Risk Index.
How: we estimate what a county's yearly natural-hazard losses will be by late century (around 2085) under a higher-emissions scenario, as a share of everything exposed. Three steps:
Counties are ranked on that late-century figure, and the fifth with the lowest projected losses scores 5. Because it starts from today's losses and adds the projected growth, a county that is risky now and getting worse scores lowest, and a county that is safe now and stays safe scores highest.
Limits: only five hazard types have future projections, so for places where tornadoes, river floods or earthquakes dominate, this is mostly today's risk carried forward. FEMA's heat losses are small in dollar terms (they count deaths and crop damage, not comfort or power bills), so heat moves this score less than you might expect, even in places like Phoenix. Crop losses count, so farm counties facing much worse drought score poorly. Dividing by exposure means a big county is not penalised just for being big (unlike the Hazard safety factor, which uses FEMA's overall score).
Sources: USDA ERS Rural-Urban Continuum Codes (2023), plus the EPA Superfund National Priorities List.
How: the USDA code runs from 1 (part of a metro area of 1 million or more) to 9 (rural, small towns, far from any metro). We treat the middle as the sweet spot: code 5 (non-metro, 20,000+ urban residents, not next to a metro area) scores best, and each step toward either big-city or very remote costs points. Each Superfund site in the county takes off a little more (the penalty grows more slowly after the first few). Counties are then ranked into fifths.
Limits: the "middle is best" rule is a judgment call: it stands in for affordable land that still has hospitals, stores and jobs within reach. It is not a measure of actual land prices. Superfund sites were matched to counties by name (about 95% matched; most misses are in Connecticut, which replaced its counties with planning regions in 2022).
Built from a one-time, periodically refreshed data pull, not a live feed. US only for now; Canada is not yet included.