After having been briefly removed in of March, 2025, FEMA has restored information regarding the Community Disaster Resilience Zones (CDRZs) on its website. The Community Disaster Resilience Zones (CDRZ) Act explicitly requires the President to “maintain a natural hazard assessment program that develops and maintains products that [] are available to the public; and define natural hazard risk across the United States.”
See the zones mapped on FEMA’s website.
In the event the data becomes inaccessible again in the future, the CDRZ data has been archived, including the agency’s methodology and designations, as of Feb. 24, 2025. ESRI has also produced a mapping tool based on archived CDRZs data.
Background
In 2022, Congress passed the Community Disaster Resilience Zones (CDRZ) Act, requiring the President to “develop and maintain products that show the risk of natural hazards across the United States.” The law amended the Stafford Act to require the President to designate community disaster resilience zones every five years based on specific criteria, among other mandates.
FEMA announced the first designation of Community Disaster Resilience Zones (CDRZs) on Sep. 26, 2023. The CDRZs are census tracts that the agency identified as the most at risk to disasters. The selected 483 census tracts receive additional federal cost-share for projects, and prioritized access to federal funding for resilience and mitigation projects. Prior to designating the CDRZs, FEMA requested public comment on implementing the Act, including which data and methodology to rely on. FEMA also relied on the National Risk Index to identify the most at-risk underserved communities for the resilience zones.
On Dec. 11, 2024, FEMA announced a second round of CDRZ designations, including 275 census tracts in territories and on Tribal Nation lands.