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.