Social vulnerability refers to the resilience of communities when responding to or recovering from threats to public health. The Vermont Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) is a planning tool to evaluate the relative social vulnerability across the state. It can be used if there is a disease outbreak or in the event of an emergency—either natural or human-caused—to identify populations that may need more help.
The SVI draws together 16 different measures of vulnerability in three different themes: socioeconomic, demographic, and housing/transportation, which are defined in the app documentation. For every measure, census tracts above the 90th percentile, or the most vulnerable 10%, are assigned a flag. The vulnerability index is created by counting the total number of flags in each census tract. The higher the count, the more vulnerable the population.
