We will use Carbondale, Illinois as our community for this exercise. There is a variety of data we can use but here’s some information to get us started.
We want to know what’s going on in Carbondale. Who lives there, what are the demographics, main industries, main jobs, what are the biggest businesses? If you can’t look at your exact location there might be information about a larger area such as your county.
https://datausa.io/profile/geo/jackson-county-il
Most places have a disaster mitigation plan, so we’ll take a look at that:
https://www2.illinois.gov/iema/Mitigation/documents/CountyPlans/plan_JacksonCounty.pdf
You can click on the image below to get a larger version.
What’s interesting to note is that
- A lot of Jackson County’s “specialized” productivity comes from outdoor activities or related to dealing with natural resources.
- Health care is also a big industry, and outdoors and healthcare go nicely together.
- Most of our emissions come from housing, with transportation not too far behind.
Things you may want to consider include:
- Infrastructure
Water resources
Human resources
Local food
Schools and community cohesion
Disaster preparedness
Clean energy
