Many index-related approaches to social vulnerability display so many weaknesses as to be unhelpful. It might be useful to start my understanding the deep-rooted qualitative nature of vulnerability and where disasters arise from:

1. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pdisas.2019.100008

2. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13753-018-0188-3

3. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13753-015-0038-5

4. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-016-2294-0

5. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13753-015-0046-5

Then, depending on your needs, you could determine the relevance of an index-related approach and how to ensure that you can develop one which truly matches your needs and the traits of social vulnerability.

Thank you Ilan Kelman and Joseph Nyangon for your helpful contributions.

You can create an index to represent social vulnerability of any community. It is usually based on a number of characteristics of that community making it suffer more in the consequence of a natural hazard or disruption.

Please see our recent papers to have an idea on vulnerability, resilience, risk assessment, and sustainability from a coastal community perspective. You can also get the guideline about application of geospatial tools and models for geographic evaluation. I hope these will be helpful.

Article Risk assessment for the sustainability of coastal communitie...

Article Integrating Typhoon Destructive Potential and Social‐Ecologi...

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https://svi.cdc.gov/ Technical Report The CDC/ATSDR Public Health Vulnerability Mapping System: Us...