AUTHOR=Cano Pecharroman Lidia , Tier Melissa Oberon , Weber Elke U. 

TITLE=Feature importance of climate vulnerability indicators with gradient boosting across five global cities

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Climate

VOLUME=Volume 7 - 2025

YEAR=2025

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/climate/articles/10.3389/fclim.2025.1521507

DOI=10.3389/fclim.2025.1521507

ISSN=2624-9553

ABSTRACT=Efforts are needed to better identify and measure both communities’ exposure to climate hazards and the social vulnerabilities that interact with these hazards, but the science of validating climate risk indicators is still in its infancy. Progress is needed to improve: (1) the selection of variables that are used as proxies to represent hazard exposure and vulnerability; (2) the applicability and scale for which these indicators are intended, including their suitability for transnational comparisons. We draw on an international urban survey in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Johannesburg, South Africa; London, United Kingdom; New York City, United States; and Seoul, South Korea that collected data on: exposure to various types of extreme weather events, socioeconomic characteristics commonly used as proxies for vulnerability (i.e., income, education level, gender, and age), and additional characteristics not often included in existing composite indices (i.e., Queer identity, disability identity, non-dominant primary language, and self-perceptions of both discrimination and vulnerability to climate hazard risk). We use feature importance analysis with gradient-boosted decision trees to measure the importance that these variables have in predicting exposure to various types of extreme weather events. Our results show that non-traditional variables were more relevant to self-reported exposure to extreme weather events than traditionally employed variables such as income or age. Furthermore, differences in variable relevance across different types of hazards and across urban contexts suggest that vulnerability indicators need to be fit to context and should not be used in a one-size-fits-all fashion.