National Human Settlement - Social Fabric and Capacity Thresholds

The Social Vulnerability component of the National Human Settlement Layer (NHSL) includes information about broad spatial patterns of social vulnerability at the neighbourhood scale, and indicators about the capacities for a community to withstand and recover from disaster events based on intrinsic characteristics of housing, family structure, individual autonomy and financial agency.

Information in the model provides a means of comparing relative levels of social vulnerability from one region to another across Canada and helps to identify specific dimensions within a community that contributes to their relative levels of social vulnerability. This information is not intended for site-specific study, but instead to understand broad patterns of social characteristics and vulnerability across multiple census dissemination areas.