SURVIVABILITY INDEX
I mean this is over a half years worth of work with insurers, community developers, green infrastructure and emergency and relief data. We needed to understand how to measure trust over a period of a project. It’s called it stick-to-edness in some parts and to insurers its where untapped profitability resides. You know we are going to Not have an ability to insure our homes in some parts of the country if climate and biodiversity continues to suffer. We want to keep Insurance in the game of fixing the drivers of emergencies so we are working on ways to quantify behavior enough to convert individual policies into community bonds, so communities can profit as well from the work they do to save themselves from natures emergencies. These are multi year proof point partnerships where floods or fires or shoreline restoration is prevalent, to reach that objective. Here’s our first index which we continue to evolve and grow from.
Survivability Index™
Physical risk models tell you where the loss could happen. This tells you whether the community will still be doing the right thing when it matters.
The Gap in Every Physical Model
Every major carrier, reinsurer, and infrastructure financier already has sophisticated physical risk modeling — wildfire spread, flood exposure, storm surge, structural vulnerability. What none of them have is a way to answer a different, equally decisive question: will the community behind the policy, the bond, or the credit actually sustain the mitigation and stewardship behaviors that determine whether a physical risk becomes an actual claim?
A hardened home in a community that lets defensible space lapse after year two is a different risk than the same home in a community that maintains it for decades. A green infrastructure bond in a community that abandons stewardship once funding attention moves on is a different risk than one in a community that doesn't. Physical modeling can't see that difference. Survivability Index was built specifically to measure it.
The Method
Survivability Index scores a community's behavioral capacity to sustain an investment over its full lifespan — not at the moment of underwriting, but across the years that determine whether the investment actually holds. It's built on Community Intelligence's core instrument: 174 real-time behavioral indicators, read at ZIP+4 precision, with zero personally identifiable information collected. The score isn't a demographic proxy. It's a direct behavioral read of the specific place in question.
Where It Already Applies
Wildfire & WUI
Which communities will maintain home hardening and defensible space for the life of the policy, not just the year it's underwritten.
Application: Portfolio-level behavioral scoring for WUI carriers
Flood & Resilience Infrastructure
Whether a community will steward green infrastructure long enough to justify the bond issued against it.
Proof: Milwaukee MMSD, $84M, live client engagement
Coastal & Blue Carbon
Whether a community around a restored mangrove or wetland belt will maintain it for the life of the credits issued against it.
Application: Behavioral stewardship layer for blue carbon validation
Milwaukee MMSD
$84M in green infrastructure investment, planned through 2033, with Survivability Index built directly into the resilience-bond structure — giving the bond issuer a measured survivability score instead of a hoped-for one.
The Research Question We're Testing Now
The broader actuarial and public health literature on social-determinant data has been genuinely mixed — generic demographic and social-risk data has often failed to reliably improve prediction beyond standard clinical or physical models. We think that's a data-quality problem, not a dead end: most of that data is static and generic. Survivability Index is different by design — longitudinal, behavioral, and built specifically to capture trust and stewardship dynamics rather than appended demographic files.
What a Partnership Looks Like
Not a platform purchase. A scoped pilot: a defined portfolio, a defined comparison against your existing baseline, a defined timeline — structured so your team can see directly whether the behavioral layer adds predictive lift before anything scales further.
Interested in a scoped pilot on your own portfolio? We're currently in active conversations with several carriers, reinsurers, and infrastructure financiers structured exactly this way.
Start a conversationSurvivability Index™
Will this community still be doing the right thing in year seven?
The first behavioral instrument that predicts whether a community can sustain collective action across a program, investment, or recovery cycle — not just adopt it in year one.
Physical risk models measure exposure and hazard. What they cannot measure is behavioral capacity — whether the community on the receiving end of a program, investment, or campaign will implement it, maintain it, and sustain the behavior that makes it work. That gap is where claims live, programs fail, and recovery money disappears.
The Question No Other Model Asks
A green infrastructure investment can be engineered correctly, funded adequately, and installed on schedule — and still fail in year three when the community stops maintaining it. A public health program can achieve strong initial adoption and collapse eighteen months later when the grant ends and the institutional support withdraws. A resilience initiative can be celebrated at launch and abandoned before it's ever tested.
These are not engineering failures or funding failures. They are behavioral failures — and they were predictable before a dollar was committed. The behavioral conditions required for sustained collective action either exist in a community or they don't. Survivability Index™ measures which.
Survivability answers the question physical models cannot: not whether this community is at risk, but whether it can sustain the response the investment requires. That is the variable that has always been in the outcome data — and has never been in the model.
The Score — What It Means
Survivability runs 0–100. The score reflects the integrated behavioral capacity of a community across four dimensions. It is not a rating of the community — it is a read of conditions that can change, and that we track as they do.
Four Dimensions — One Integrated Score
Each dimension is derived from aggregate behavioral signals — publicly auditable, zero PII at any stage. The score is the integration of all four, weighted by context.
Functional institutions per capita: mutual aid networks, neighborhood associations, emergency response capacity. The structural skeleton of behavioral resilience. Measured from participation rates, not from directories.
Did this community prepare before prior hazard events — or wait and respond? Past behavioral patterns are the strongest predictor of future ones. Communities that prepared once prepare again. Communities that didn't, don't.
How collective action mobilizes under stress. Horizontal peer networks versus vertical institutional channels. Determines whether a mobilization message actually reaches the people it needs to reach — and whether they act on it.
The community's demonstrated capacity to move through behavioral ask stages — from easy through medium to hard. Communities that skip stages fail. CFI shows which stage they're actually in, before you ask them to do something they can't yet sustain.
The CFI Sequence — Why Stages Cannot Be Skipped
Survivability includes a behavioral adoption sequence that determines which kinds of asks a community can absorb. Every community is somewhere in this sequence. Asking for stage three behavior from a stage one community produces initial adoption and subsequent abandonment — the pattern that generates the stewardship failure claims insurers are already pricing without knowing why.
| Stage | What it looks like | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Easy CFI | Attends workshop. Installs rain barrel. Joins community emergency team. | Low commitment, immediate benefit. Most communities can reach this stage. Baseline adoption signal — but not a predictor of sustained behavior. |
| Medium CFI | Commits to flood insurance. Advocates at city council. Participates in watershed planning. | Requires trust in external expertise and delayed benefit. Where most programs stall. The 40% ceiling that well-designed programs keep hitting without knowing why. |
| Hard CFI | Floodplain reconnection. Rejecting familiar development for nature-based solutions. Leading politically contested resilience initiatives. | Identity and economic risk. Only high-Survivability communities reach this stage reliably. Where physical risk models diverge most sharply from behavioral reality. |
Where It Has Been Deployed
Standard program stuck at 38% CPR adoption for years. Survivability read showed Critical-band civic infrastructure. Routing through Authentic Messengers bypassed the institutional channel entirely.
Two adjacent corridors with divergent Survivability scores. One carried stewardship capacity. One showed Social Default conditions — adoption without maintenance as the predicted failure mode.
Same electoral geography. Same county-level demographic data. Completely different behavioral infrastructure. County-level models treated them identically. ZIP+4 Survivability scoring shows they require entirely different strategies.
Low-Survivability communities in high-physical-risk zones show consistent failure to adopt mitigation subsidies across multiple grant cycles — the stewardship failure pattern that generates claims insurers are pricing without understanding.
Deployment figures represent verified outcomes (Pittsburgh) and live client engagements (MMSD). WUI findings are directional — actuarial quantification is in development and pending co-verification. We name which claims are documented and which are developing.
Every Survivability score is derived from aggregate behavioral signals. Zero personally identifiable information collected, stored, or used at any stage. The unit of analysis is always the community — never the person.
Data streams: civic participation rates, health program utilization, economic behavioral indicators, electoral engagement, infrastructure use patterns. All publicly available, all auditable.
The score is not a judgment about a community. It is a read of current conditions — conditions that change, and that we track as they do. A Critical-band community is not a failed community. It is a community where the right sequence of behavioral investment produces the strongest returns.
The highest Friction is always where the highest DELTA lives. The same is true here: the lowest Survivability scores mark the communities where the right intervention produces the largest measurable impact.