For an older person living alone during an intense Argentine summer, climate resilience can become very practical very quickly. It may depend on whether the home remains tolerably cool, whether drinking water is available, whether medication is stored safely, whether a family member or care worker can reach the property, and whether somebody notices when the person stops answering the telephone. During flooding, the same person's safety may depend on accessible transport, electricity, local communications and a service that already knows who will need additional assistance rather than trying to identify vulnerable residents after an emergency has begun.
These are not only environmental or emergency-management questions. They are increasingly questions about the design of long-term care, disability support, public health, housing and community infrastructure. Argentina already faces climatic hazards including extreme heat, drought and flooding, while its ageing population means that a growing number of people may be living with frailty, chronic illness, disability or dependence on regular support. The Argentina Ageing, Long-Term Care and Community Support Knowledge Hub therefore needs to consider climate resilience as part of the future operating model for care rather than as a separate environmental subject.
The central policy challenge is not simply to protect a category labelled “vulnerable people.” It is to understand how climate hazards interact with functional ability, housing, income, health, social isolation, geography and dependence on infrastructure. Stronger social care resilience would connect national climate adaptation with provincial and municipal planning, health services, PAMI, providers, civil protection, utilities, families and neighbourhood networks while preserving autonomy and avoiding unnecessary institutional responses.
Climate adaptation is becoming part of Argentina's care-system challenge
Argentina has a national climate-policy architecture within which this wider care challenge can develop. Law 27,520, the Ley de Presupuestos Mínimos de Adaptación y Mitigación al Cambio Climático Global, establishes minimum environmental requirements for climate adaptation and mitigation across the national territory. Argentina's Second National Adaptation and Mitigation Plan to 2030, approved in 2023, provides a cross-sector framework intended to strengthen resilience and reduce vulnerability, with particular attention to communities and social groups exposed to greater risk.
Health has also developed its own climate dimension. The Estrategia Nacional de Salud y Cambio Climático links climate adaptation with health-system preparedness, and work involving national and provincial actors has sought to strengthen institutional capacity for climate-resilient health services. That matters to social care because extreme events rarely respect administrative boundaries. A heatwave may first appear as dehydration, cardiovascular deterioration or an emergency admission, while its underlying causes may include an overheated home, isolation, inadequate support or failure to adapt a care routine.
The social-care implication is broader than emergency response. Climate risk needs to influence how communities identify need, how services assess environmental circumstances, how continuity plans are tested and how local systems understand the interaction between health and disability and functional need.
Argentina's federal structure makes this especially important. National frameworks can establish direction, information and minimum approaches, but exposure and response capacity vary substantially between provinces and municipalities. Heat in a dense urban neighbourhood, river flooding, wildfire smoke, drought-related water insecurity and severe storms create different operational demands. A nationally coherent approach therefore does not mean an identical local response.
Climate vulnerability is created by the interaction between people, place and support
Older age does not automatically make someone unable to manage an emergency, and disability should not be treated as synonymous with helplessness. A physically active older adult with secure housing, air conditioning, reliable transport and strong family connections may be better able to withstand a heatwave than a much younger person with severe chronic illness, poverty and social isolation.
Risk increases when several factors combine. These can include reduced mobility, cognitive impairment, cardiovascular or respiratory disease, dependence on electrically powered equipment, medication that affects temperature regulation, inaccessible emergency information, poor-quality housing, limited income, living alone or dependence on a small number of carers.
That interaction matters because climate adaptation based only on age thresholds can miss people whose actual circumstances place them at greater risk. It can also unnecessarily categorize independent older people as inherently vulnerable. A stronger approach uses population intelligence alongside individual knowledge to understand who may need additional contact, what support they depend upon and which environmental conditions could interrupt it.
This connects climate planning with wider data-led equity planning. Municipalities and service systems can combine demographic information with knowledge of heat exposure, flood risk, housing conditions, social isolation and service dependency. Individual information must still be governed appropriately, but aggregated evidence can show where resilience investment is most needed before an emergency occurs.
Extreme heat turns ordinary care arrangements into safety-critical infrastructure
Heat is particularly important for an ageing society because physiological ability to regulate temperature can reduce with age, while chronic illness and some medications can increase susceptibility to heat-related harm. The risk is not confined to dramatic heatstroke. Extreme temperatures can worsen cardiovascular, respiratory, renal and other conditions, contribute to dehydration and fatigue, and make everyday activities substantially harder.
For social care, the practical question is what changes when a forecast moves from ordinary summer weather to sustained extreme heat. A home-support visit designed around washing, dressing or medication may also need to consider hydration, indoor temperature, ventilation, food storage and signs of heat stress. A residential service may need to alter activities, staffing deployment, hydration monitoring and the use of cooler internal areas. A community centre may become part of a local cooling strategy.
Effective preparation therefore depends on triggers rather than improvisation. Local arrangements can define what happens when official heat warnings reach specified levels: which people receive additional contact, which services adjust schedules, who checks essential equipment, how families are informed and when concerns are escalated to health services.
Organizations examining the balance between protection and personal choice can use the Positive Risk Enablement Planner to structure thinking about proportionate risk. The tool does not replace Argentine clinical, legal or emergency requirements, but the underlying principle is important. Climate safety should support people to remain in control of their lives wherever possible rather than using weather risk as a reason for blanket restrictions.
Operational scenario: a heatwave exposes hidden vulnerability
An 81-year-old woman lives alone in an apartment in Rosario. She manages most daily activities independently and receives limited assistance with shopping and heavier household tasks. Her daughter lives elsewhere and speaks with her regularly. On paper, she would not appear to require intensive support.
During several days of extreme heat, however, the apartment remains hot overnight. The woman limits drinking because walking repeatedly to the bathroom is difficult, and she begins feeling weak and confused. Her usual support visit is not scheduled until later in the week.
A climate-aware community system changes the response before the situation becomes an emergency. A locally agreed heat protocol identifies people who combine older age, living alone and known functional limitations. The service makes additional telephone contact and, when the conversation raises concern, arranges an earlier visit. The worker checks the immediate environment and the woman's condition, supports hydration, contacts her daughter with consent and seeks health advice because her confusion represents a clinical concern.
The governance lesson comes afterwards. The event is not recorded merely as an isolated welfare check. The municipality and participating services examine whether similar residents are concentrated in buildings with high heat exposure, whether cooling spaces are accessible and whether existing home- and community-based support can flex during extreme weather. A single intervention therefore becomes evidence for population-level adaptation without assuming that every older resident requires the same response.
Housing determines whether ageing at home remains resilient
Argentina's future emphasis on supporting people in their own homes cannot be separated from the physical resilience of those homes. Ageing in place is only sustainable when the home remains safe under changing environmental conditions.
Heat exposure is shaped by building materials, ventilation, shading, access to green space, energy affordability and the urban heat-island effect. Flood resilience depends on location, drainage, building access, ground-floor exposure and the ability to protect essential possessions, medicines and equipment. Power interruption can affect refrigeration, lifts, communication devices, oxygen equipment and other technologies on which some people depend.
This creates a strong connection between care policy and housing policy. An assessment of support needs that ignores environmental conditions may underestimate future risk. Conversely, relatively modest adaptations to a dwelling or neighbourhood can sometimes reduce dependence and prevent disruption more effectively than increasing formal care hours.
Climate resilience should therefore become one consideration within housing adaptations, community planning and housing-health partnerships. The objective is not to turn care workers into building inspectors. It is to create referral routes when frontline staff identify conditions that materially affect health, safety or continuity.
Flooding tests the entire chain of community support
Flooding creates a different form of care-system stress. The immediate danger of water is only one part of the problem. Roads can become impassable, public transport can stop, electricity can fail, drinking-water quality can be affected and pharmacies, health centres or community services can become inaccessible.
For a person who depends on several daily support visits, interruption for even a relatively short period can become serious. Someone may require assistance to transfer from bed, prepare food, take medication or use the toilet. Another person may rely on a family caregiver who lives across a flooded area. A residential facility may remain physically safe while losing access to staff, supplies or external clinical support.
Continuity planning therefore needs to map dependencies rather than simply list hazards. Services should understand which functions cannot safely stop, how long they can operate without normal infrastructure and which alternative arrangements become necessary at different levels of disruption.
This is the practical core of emergency preparedness in community-based services: resilience is created before the flood through information, relationships, transport arrangements, workforce contingencies and clear decision rights.
Operational scenario: flooding isolates a community care route
A municipality in the province of Buenos Aires experiences significant flooding after prolonged heavy rainfall. Several streets used by home-support workers become inaccessible. Among the people affected is a man with a physical disability who requires assistance twice daily and uses electrically powered equipment in his home.
A generic emergency plan might tell staff not to enter unsafe areas. That protects workers but does not answer what happens to the person whose service has stopped. A mature continuity arrangement already classifies essential support dependencies, records safe alternative contact methods and identifies who has authority to escalate when routine access fails.
The provider contacts the individual, confirms his immediate position and checks the status of electricity and equipment. The municipal emergency structure is informed that access is not simply a transport inconvenience but a care-continuity issue. Alternative safe access is explored, while health services are involved if the interruption creates a clinical risk. If remaining at home becomes unsafe, any temporary relocation is planned around accessibility, equipment, medication and the person's preferences rather than treating evacuation as the end of the care responsibility.
After the flood, the relevant question is not whether the continuity plan existed. It is whether it worked. Were priority residents identified quickly? Did staff know who could make decisions? Were emergency services given useful information? Did relocation preserve dignity and accessibility? The answers should influence future municipal planning, provider continuity arrangements and infrastructure investment.
Emergency planning must include people who depend on care infrastructure
Traditional emergency planning can focus heavily on the incident itself: warning, evacuation, shelter, emergency health response and restoration of essential services. Social care adds another layer because some people cannot simply pause the support on which daily life depends.
A climate-resilient care system needs to understand at least five forms of dependency:
- people who need regular human assistance for essential daily activities;
- people who depend on medicines, oxygen, refrigeration or electrically powered equipment;
- people who require accessible communication or support to understand emergency information;
- people whose safety depends heavily on a family caregiver or very small support network; and
- people whose housing or location makes evacuation, cooling or continued service access particularly difficult.
This does not require a single national register of every person considered vulnerable. Such an approach would create substantial questions about accuracy, consent, privacy and responsibility for maintaining information. More useful resilience can come from interoperable local arrangements in which organizations know their own service users, understand escalation routes and can share the minimum information necessary when an emergency requires coordinated action.
The Governance Maturity Assessment offers organizations a structured way to examine whether responsibility, assurance and escalation are sufficiently clear. In an Argentine climate context, the important test is not a particular governance model but whether national, provincial, municipal and provider responsibilities connect when ordinary arrangements are disrupted.
The workforce is simultaneously a response asset and an exposed population
Climate resilience depends heavily on workers, yet care workers themselves may be affected by the same emergency. They may live in flooded neighbourhoods, depend on disrupted public transport, have children or relatives requiring care, or face unsafe temperatures while travelling between homes.
A continuity plan that assumes the entire workforce will remain available during a major event is therefore structurally weak. Providers and public services need to model reduced staffing availability and identify which functions receive priority. Cross-training, local deployment, alternative transport, supervisory escalation and reciprocal arrangements between services can all strengthen resilience where they are feasible.
Extreme heat also changes the conditions of work. Home-care staff may travel repeatedly between hot environments. Residential staff may work in buildings that are difficult to cool. Protective measures need to account for hydration, rest, scheduling, occupational safety and the additional cognitive burden of monitoring people at increased risk.
This is why climate resilience connects with workforce capability and skill mix, not merely workforce numbers. Staff need enough knowledge to recognize heat-related deterioration, environmental risk and the implications of infrastructure failure while understanding when an issue requires health, emergency or managerial escalation.
The stronger model is not to make every care worker an emergency specialist. It is to build climate competence into ordinary practice: recognizing changing risk, knowing the local protocol, communicating clearly and documenting significant concerns so that repeated patterns become visible.
Residential care needs resilience beyond evacuation plans
Residential long-term care settings concentrate both risk and response capacity. Residents may include people with frailty, dementia, limited mobility, complex medication regimes or high dependence on staff. At the same time, the setting provides an organized workforce, shared infrastructure and the possibility of coordinated preparation.
Climate resilience therefore needs to extend well beyond a fire-style evacuation document. Providers need to understand thermal conditions across the building, backup power, water supply, food and medication continuity, staffing resilience, communications and safe evacuation options for people with different mobility and cognitive needs.
Heat presents a particular governance challenge because harm may accumulate without a single dramatic incident. Indoor temperatures can remain high overnight; residents may be unable to express thirst; sedating medication or cognitive impairment may obscure early deterioration. Monitoring therefore needs to connect environmental conditions with resident wellbeing rather than treating building temperature as a facilities issue separate from care quality.
Flooding or severe storms may produce the opposite challenge: whether to evacuate. Moving frail residents can itself create risk, particularly for people with dementia or complex health needs. Decisions should therefore be based on the actual threat, the resilience of the building, available transport, receiving locations and the consequences of movement.
That reflects the wider principle of positive risk-taking and least restrictive practice. Protection matters, but emergency decisions should remain proportionate and individualized wherever circumstances allow.
Operational scenario: a residence faces prolonged heat and power instability
A long-term care residence experiences extreme heat at the same time as intermittent electricity interruptions. Several residents have dementia, others have cardiovascular conditions, and the building's coolest areas depend partly on mechanical cooling.
The immediate operational response combines facilities management with clinical and care oversight. Residents at higher physiological risk receive increased observation and hydration support. Activities are moved away from hotter spaces, non-essential heat-generating equipment is reduced, staff monitor indoor conditions and contingency arrangements for power failure are activated.
The crucial decision is whether the building remains safe enough for residents to stay. Evacuating dozens of frail people is not automatically safer. Leadership therefore needs real-time information about temperatures, power reliability, resident condition, backup capacity, transport and suitable receiving facilities.
If similar events recur, the answer cannot remain repeated emergency improvisation. Governance should examine capital investment, shading, insulation, ventilation, backup energy, staff training and whether the building's physical design remains appropriate for a warmer climate. Climate adaptation thereby becomes part of long-term quality and infrastructure planning rather than a seasonal emergency task.
Families and informal caregivers need to be inside resilience planning
Argentina's care system relies substantially on families. During emergencies, family networks often provide rapid assistance that formal systems could not reproduce at the same scale. They check relatives, move people to safer locations, collect medicines, provide transport and bridge interruptions in formal support.
That contribution should be recognized without becoming an assumption that families will absorb every additional climate burden. A daughter who normally visits an older parent may be unable to cross a flooded city. A spouse providing intensive care may already be physically exhausted before a heatwave begins. A household may not have the money to run cooling equipment continuously or replace food spoiled during a power cut.
Climate resilience therefore requires attention to family carers and care burden. Services should know where care arrangements are highly dependent on one unpaid person and consider what happens if that person becomes unavailable.
Communication also matters. Families need clear, practical information about what services will do during an emergency, whom to contact, what changes require escalation and what contingency arrangements exist. Responsibility becomes safer when it is explicit rather than silently transferred between family and formal services.
Climate resilience is an equity issue
Climate hazards are not experienced equally. The same temperature can have very different consequences depending on housing quality, access to cooling, income, health, employment, neighbourhood infrastructure and social connections. Flood exposure likewise interacts with where people can afford to live and how easily they can recover afterwards.
Argentina's geographic and socioeconomic diversity makes this especially significant. Dense metropolitan areas, smaller provincial cities, rural communities and remote settlements have different hazards and different response assets. A resilience strategy designed around easy access to hospitals, reliable broadband, private transport and stable electricity will not fit every locality.
The stronger approach is therefore risk-sensitive universalism: emergency systems should work for the whole population while additional support is directed according to actual barriers and dependencies. This avoids both extremes of assuming everybody can respond identically and categorizing whole populations as incapable.
Climate adaptation also needs to consider recovery. Lower-income households may find it harder to replace damaged mobility equipment, medicines, furniture or food. People renting insecure or unsuitable accommodation may have less control over building adaptations. A disaster can therefore convert temporary disruption into longer-term functional decline, displacement or increased care dependence.
Technology can strengthen resilience, but only if the infrastructure survives
Digital systems can make climate preparedness considerably more precise. Weather warnings can trigger service protocols. Electronic records can identify people dependent on particular equipment. Geographic information can show where service users overlap with flood or heat exposure. Remote contact can maintain some support when travel is disrupted.
Yet technology creates its own dependencies. Electricity failure can disable routers, charging, lifts, cooling systems and monitoring devices. Mobile networks can become congested. An older person may not use an app through which emergency information is distributed. A sensor can detect temperature but cannot necessarily determine what response a particular person wants or needs.
Organizations considering these questions can use the Digital Transformation, AI and Cybersecurity Readiness Assessment to examine whether technology is being introduced with sufficient attention to governance, continuity and human oversight. The relevance to climate resilience is straightforward: a digital dependency should itself have a contingency.
Future predictive systems may also combine weather forecasts, service dependency and population information to identify where additional capacity may be needed. Such approaches should support professional and operational decisions rather than automatically label individuals as vulnerable or determine access to assistance.
Data should turn climate events into system learning
Every significant heatwave, flood or severe-weather event produces information. Services learn which residents were difficult to contact, which buildings overheated, which roads prevented visits, which workforce contingencies worked and where emergency communication failed. The value of that information depends on whether it travels beyond the immediate incident.
At provider level, after-action review can identify changes to staffing, equipment, contact protocols or building resilience. At municipal level, aggregated evidence can reveal neighbourhoods where care disruption repeatedly overlaps with environmental exposure. Provincial analysis can identify broader infrastructure or service-capacity problems. Nationally, patterns can inform climate adaptation, health preparedness and future standards.
This is where after-action review and system learning become more important than simply recording that an emergency plan was activated. Useful questions include whether people remained safe, whether essential support continued, whether avoidable hospital use occurred, whether particular groups experienced disproportionate disruption and whether recovery restored previous levels of independence.
The evidence should also include people's experience. A technically successful evacuation may still have been frightening, inaccessible or unnecessarily restrictive. A telephone welfare-check programme may report high completion while missing people unable to hear, understand or use the communication method. Quantitative measures therefore need qualitative feedback from people receiving support, families and frontline workers.
Operational scenario: repeated flooding changes local investment decisions
A municipality experiences flooding in the same low-lying neighbourhood several times over a number of years. Each event generates emergency activity, but initially the incidents are treated separately. Home visits are missed, several older residents are temporarily relocated and one community facility repeatedly becomes inaccessible.
By bringing information together, the municipality can see a persistent care-system pattern rather than a sequence of unrelated weather events. Service data show where continuity breaks down. Residents explain that the designated evacuation location is difficult to reach for people with mobility limitations. Frontline workers identify a small number of streets that repeatedly prevent access.
The response then shifts from emergency management to adaptation. Options might include alternative community support locations, revised transport arrangements, improved communication, infrastructure work and different deployment plans for care teams. The precise measures depend on local authority, funding and feasibility, but the decision is now informed by evidence about human consequences as well as physical flood exposure.
A Community Impact Report Builder can help organizations structure evidence about how community-level interventions affect access, continuity and outcomes. In this context, its value lies in making the social consequences of resilience investment more visible rather than treating climate adaptation solely as an engineering question.
Governance must connect climate, health, social support and emergency management
No single part of Argentina's system can manage this agenda alone. Climate policy, health, social development, civil protection, housing, infrastructure, energy, transport, municipalities, PAMI, provincial services, private and nonprofit providers, families and community organizations each control part of the resilience chain.
The central governance problem is therefore coordination without ambiguity. Cross-sector collaboration is valuable, but somebody still needs to know who is responsible for each operational decision. During an extreme event, unclear responsibility can delay action precisely when time matters.
Effective governance should make several questions answerable before an emergency:
- Which organization holds information about people whose essential support may be disrupted?
- Who activates enhanced contact or continuity arrangements when an official warning is issued?
- How are health concerns distinguished from social-support or emergency-management needs?
- Who coordinates when transport, electricity or water failure makes a care plan unworkable?
- How are significant failures reviewed across organizational boundaries?
- How do recurring local problems influence provincial or national adaptation decisions?
This is a practical form of cross-sector system leadership. Its success should be judged by whether the interfaces work, not by how many coordination structures exist.
Climate resilience should become part of ordinary care-system investment
One of the most important shifts for Argentina will be moving climate adaptation from the margins of emergency planning into ordinary decisions about services and infrastructure.
A new residential facility expected to operate for decades should be designed for future climatic conditions, not simply historic averages. A home-support model should consider how routes operate during flooding and extreme heat. Digital transformation should include power and communications resilience. Workforce plans should account for climate-related disruption. Housing adaptations should consider thermal comfort as well as mobility and accessibility.
Funding arrangements influence whether that shift happens. Organizations under intense short-term financial pressure may defer investment whose benefits appear mainly in avoided future harm. Public authorities may fund emergency response from one budget while the preventive adaptation required to reduce that response sits elsewhere. Families may bear energy or adaptation costs that are invisible within formal care expenditure.
The economic case therefore needs to examine consequences across systems. Better heat resilience may prevent deterioration and emergency health use. Reliable community continuity may avoid unnecessary relocation. More resilient housing may help people remain independent. The benefits are partly financial, but they also include dignity, security and continuity of ordinary life.
Preparedness should protect autonomy rather than replace it
Climate emergencies can create pressure for rapid decisions, but vulnerability does not remove a person's rights. Older and disabled people should be involved in planning for foreseeable emergencies wherever possible: where they would prefer to go if evacuation became necessary, who should be contacted, what equipment or medication must accompany them, how information should be communicated and which routines are particularly important.
This is especially significant for people with dementia, intellectual disability, sensory impairment or communication differences. Accessible information and supported decision-making should be built into preparedness rather than improvised during a crisis.
Emergency protection can sometimes require urgent action, but the general direction should remain consistent with rights, consent and decision-making. The purpose of resilience is not simply survival through an extreme event. It is to preserve as much control, continuity and dignity as circumstances permit.
That principle also changes how systems view people using services. Older and disabled residents are not only recipients of emergency plans. They possess local knowledge about buildings, neighbourhoods, transport barriers, communication and what makes support workable. Their participation can improve the quality of resilience planning itself.
What Argentina's experience can contribute internationally
Argentina's combination of federal governance, large geographic variation, major metropolitan areas, remote communities, extensive family involvement in care and a mixed health and long-term support landscape makes climate resilience a complex system-design issue. The institutional mechanisms cannot simply be exported to countries with different administrative, insurance or social-care structures.
The transferable lesson lies instead in the connection between climate adaptation and care dependency. Extreme weather becomes a social-care problem when it disrupts the relationships, infrastructure and routines that enable someone to live safely and independently.
That principle is relevant internationally. Climate-resilient care systems need to know not only where environmental hazards will occur but what those hazards will interrupt. A flood map cannot show by itself who depends on a twice-daily care visit. A heat forecast cannot show whose medication, housing or cognitive impairment increases risk. A list of service users cannot show whether their neighbourhood is becoming hotter or repeatedly inaccessible.
The stronger intelligence comes from connecting these forms of knowledge while respecting privacy and local governance. Other systems can adapt that principle without reproducing Argentina's institutional arrangements.
Towards a climate-resilient care system
Argentina's next stage of climate adaptation offers an opportunity to make social care and community support more visible within resilience planning. That does not require creating a separate climate bureaucracy for care. It requires climate risk to become part of existing decisions about people, services, buildings, workforce, technology and investment.
At local level, that could mean neighbourhood heat plans that include isolated older residents, accessible cooling locations and community organizations. At provider level, it means continuity arrangements tested against realistic loss of staff, power, transport and communications. At provincial level, it means connecting health preparedness with long-term care, disability and municipal capacity. At national level, it means ensuring that adaptation frameworks recognize continuity of support as one determinant of population resilience.
The strongest future model would move progressively from reacting to weather emergencies towards anticipating their care consequences. That requires better information, clearer responsibilities, resilient infrastructure and a workforce capable of adapting practice without losing sight of individual rights.
Conclusion
Climate change adds a new dimension to Argentina's long-term care challenge because it can destabilize the ordinary conditions on which independence depends. Extreme heat can turn an inadequately cooled apartment into a health risk. Flooding can turn a routine home-support route into an inaccessible service. Power failure can turn useful care technology into a point of vulnerability. For older and disabled people, the consequences are shaped as much by housing, income, functional ability, social connection and service continuity as by the climatic event itself.
Argentina already has national climate adaptation and health-policy structures on which stronger care resilience can build. The next challenge is operational: connecting those ambitions with provincial and municipal planning, community services, residential care, PAMI, health providers, emergency structures, families and the people whose lives are affected.
The strongest direction is neither to medicalize climate vulnerability nor to treat every older or disabled person as dependent. It is to create systems capable of identifying changing risk, flexing support, maintaining essential infrastructure and learning from repeated disruption while preserving autonomy and dignity.
As Argentina ages, climate resilience will increasingly become part of care quality itself. A future social-care system will be judged not only by the support it provides under normal conditions, but by whether that support can continue when heat, flooding and other emergencies place communities under pressure.