Assessing Climate-Driven Flood Risk with the Community Resilience and Adaptation Spatial Infrastructure Database (CRASID) in Urban and Rural Great Lakes Settings

Climate change is intensifying flooding in the Great Lakes watershed, threatening critical infrastructure and limiting access to emergency health services. Existing U.S. flood risk tools, such as FEMA’s Hazus and the National Risk Index, and newer models from the First Street Foundation, provide valuable coverage but often emphasize economic impacts while overlooking community-level vulnerabilities. To address this gap, we developed the Community Resilience and Adaptation Spatial Infrastructure Database (CRASID). The CRASID integrated tool combines flood risk, land use, emergency service accessibility, critical infrastructure, and sociodemographic indicators into a composite risk index. This study applies CRASID across six case study areas in the western Great Lakes—four overlapping areas in two urban metro areas (Cleveland, Detroit) and two non-overlapping rural areas—to assess model applicability and identify key drivers of flood-related risk. Statistical methods included three predictive models: principal components regression, backward stepwise regression, and boosted regression trees. The boosted regression trees model provided the strongest performance in predicting risk. Findings reveal that rural, floodplain-based communities with high concentrations of vulnerable populations are disproportionately at risk due to limited access to emergency services. While urban areas generally exhibit greater resilience, they also contain localized pockets of elevated vulnerability. These results underscore the importance of a community-centric approach, shifting focus away from primarily economic measures toward accessibility of critical services and locally relevant infrastructure. By highlighting where and for whom risks are most significant, CRASID offers policymakers and communities a novel framework for planning, adaptation, and resilience-building in the face of climate-driven flooding. This people-focused approach provides actionable insights to enhance preparedness and protect public health across diverse Great Lakes communities.