NYC School of Data 2025

New York City is a complex and dynamic home to over 8.6 million residents with high population density, aging building stock, and interconnected infrastructure. All these elements amplify the risk of the many hazards in the city. Due to these complexities, emergency managers and planners have struggled with how to prioritize planning for these hazards because there is no mechanism to determine if some risks should be prioritized over others and to compare risks for each hazard. The same challenge also applies to selecting mitigation investments by hazard. However, since there is limited funding, city planners need to know which projects will produce a higher return on mitigation investment.

In 2020, New York City Emergency Management (NYCEM) procured a vendor to build an Urban Risk Index (URI). This index aimed to allow users to visualize and understand risk through the geographic lens of New York City. The tool incorporated specific datasets unique to New York City, creating a more localized version of FEMA's National Risk Index (NRI). As well as an index, the tool allows the user to compare geospatial outputs and analyses for different hazards. The index aspect of the tool is directly complimented by its ability to present risks in the context of the New York City landscape. Following the completion of the contract, the contractor developed a rich repository of scripts and outputs that embellished the risk analysis aim of the original request.

In our presentation, Te Du and Ahmad Shaibani of NYCEM will deliver a demo for the public version of the Urban Risk Index tool. Then we will share the methodology of the index calculations including the open datasets incorporated and how they contributed to the overall index scores. We will also share a few technical details in making the tool with open source technologies and highlight how they made the tool more robust and maintainable for future iterations.