NOAA Fisheries Social Indicators for Coastal Communities

NOAA Fisheries has developed two complementary web tools to help managers, researchers, and the public to understand the well-being of over 4,600 U.S. coastal fishing communities and their resilience to the potential impacts of change. Both tools use a place-based approach, which informs research and management that serves the people most affected by change.

-Community Environmental Justice (EJ) Explorer Tool (released 2024): The latest dashboard tool allows users to query and explore detailed community information, including indicator categories (fishing dependence, environmental justice concerns, gentrification pressure, and economic), a new overall community risk score, comparison against national averages, and reference to Climate Change indicators.

-Community Social Vulnerability Indicators Tool (released 2013): The mapping and graphing tool allows users to explore and analyze coastal community well-being. This allows for broad community comparisons across 14 individual indicators covering the following categories: Fishing Dependence, Environmental Justice, Gentrification Pressure, Economic, and Climate Change.