The Lower Mystic Climate Vulnerability Assessment is different than most risk assessments by expanding the scope from focusing solely on how much damage will occur to infrastructure to include a social vulnerability assessment. This component understands what and how people will also be impacted by infrastructure failures during and after an extreme coastal storm event. The region of focus includes an area of tremendous socioeconomic diversity, wealth disparities, and environmental justice concerns. The Lower Mystic Climate Vulnerability Assessment was a multi-faceted study that included a tabletop emergency management exercise with 15 different regional infrastructure providers in the Lower Mystic, including energy sector organizations, such as Eversource National Grid, Exelon Generation, Global Oil, Gulf Oil, and Energy Transfer, as well as additional regional critical infrastructure and utilities, such as the Boston Water and Sewer Commission (BWSC), the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA), MassDOT, MBTA, and Mass General Brigham. The tabletop exercise served to understand the physical risks to our regional critical infrastructure and was then supplemented by an in-depth social vulnerability assessment to understand how the potential infrastructure failures may impact our region’s most vulnerable populations. Using these two assessments, we were able to re-think how we prioritize investments in critical infrastructure to ensure they are best serving those who most rely on those services. The assessment combines research on coastal storm impacts on both infrastructure and the people who rely on this infrastructure. This presentation will also highlight lessons learned from this process, so that others who would like to complete a similar assessment can take our model and build on and improve it for a more effective and equitable approach to this type of assessment and community engagement.