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Rapid-response equity data and analysis after disasters
July 10, 2025

Decades of research and on-the-ground experience show that marginalized people and communities tend to be most vulnerable to disaster and climate impacts and fall further behind during recovery. One way to disrupt barriers to equitable recovery is to provide rapid, high-quality data and analysis in the days after climate disasters. This data can be used to focus public conversations on key equity topics and support local journalists, elected officials, community advocates, and non-profit organizations working to develop more inclusive recovery and resiliency strategies.

The Urban Institute (Urban) is a national, non-profit organization based in Washington DC that works in direct collaboration with local changemakers and journalists. Urban sees disasters as “focusing events,” which can help form unique policy coalitions and drive change because of the intense–but brief–public interest they generate. With the CO2 Foundation’s support, Urban will catalyze robust, evidence-based conversations about important recovery issues early in the disaster recovery process, which leads to more effective community resilience strategies later. This project is intended to build organizational capacity to engage with real-time events and build cross-function teams to respond to the urgent risks posed by climate change.

In the days leading up to disasters and in the immediate aftermath, there is a window of time when the media, the public, and elected officials pay close attention to these issues and are receptive to high-quality information. And yet by the time that equity issues (for example, the loss of affordable housing) are evident, often weeks or months after the disaster, public attention has shifted, and policy change is more difficult. To address this gap, Urban will activate “rapid response protocols” or quick-turn data analyses and outreach efforts that will cover both national and low-attention disasters across different geographies and hazard types. In each instance, Urban’s data scientists, subject matter experts, government affairs and communications specialists will work together to deliver high-impact communications tools and carry out associated outreach activities.

This project will expand the infrastructure and reach of a recently piloted disaster rapid response platform. This involves expanding data infrastructure: integrating new data sources on important topics like insurance, small business impacts and public health alongside prepositioned data sources via a customized tool in R whose entire code base has been through rigorous technical review. Urban will also connect in-house experts with decades of applied expertise working with disaster-impacted communities of all sizes across the US to help local actors analyze, interpret and respond to data.

CO2F funding also supports building a living library of practical examples of communities leveraging evidence to take equitable climate action. Communities learn from the lessons of shared experience, and the engagements between Urban and impacted communities will become a public resource available to others. This resource will include fact sheets on each response and organize the practical data and evidence to help inform local conversations.

Disaster response/recovery often activates new leaders and groups that might not be well networked with climate orgs, so it’s important to think about where audiences are looking for this type of information. Case studies and factsheets developed in partnership with HHS on Environmental Justice and Head Start are a model communications tool; the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) Disaster Recovery and Resilience Coalition might be a natural channel for resource sharing for these products.

This project builds on previous work:

Urban Institute has long been focused on generating data as a public good to be accessible free of charge, and is open to sharing code libraries and other methodological information such that its analyses can be replicated by other users. The federal government’s abandonment of its own data collection and analysis has created another layer of importance to this work. Urban data scientists are working with partners in the data/research ecosystem to identify which data sets already removed or at threat would be best served by backup and access through Urban (e.g. reducing redundancy of other preservation efforts) how to accurately and sustainably host and maintain these data (with a focus on covering ongoing costs).

CO2 Foundation is enthusiastic about the potential in this project, and looks forward to engaging with Urban as the rapid response activations occur and the living library comes into being.