To systematically examine biophysical exposures amongst humans and their physical and social environments, I led two independent teams (one from UCI and one from McGill University to compute the livelihood vulnerability index (LVI) for highly exposed regions to: (1) winter storms that included lake-rich communities along the leeward shores of Great Bear and Great Slave in the Northwestern Territories, Canada; (2) wildfire exposure for the top 14 American States that are mostly exposed to wildfires. I produced a framework to compute the livelihood vulnerability index by first considering each region’s exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity to the natural disaster (known as the three contributing factors). These vulnerability studies suggested that LVI was strongly weighted on its contributing factors and was exemplified by the fact that regions can exhibit a high LVI (such as Arizona to wildfire) despite having a low exposure, due to lower adaptive capacity measures in place. The results from these studies are critical for all stakeholders , inclusive of government, policymakers, and research scientists for identifying and providing better resiliency and adaptation measures to support the regions that are most vulnerable to these natural disasters.