Social inequalities in climate change-attributed impacts of Hurricane Harvey

A shifting climate: New paradigms and challenges for (early career) scientists in extreme weather research

Research on weather and climate extremes has become integral to climate science due to their increasing societal relevance and impacts in the context of anthropogenic climate change. In this perspective we examine recent changes and evolving paradigms in the study of extreme events, emphasizing the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of research and their societal implications. We discuss the importance of understanding the physical basis of extreme events and its linkages to climate impacts, highlighting the need for collaboration across multiple disciplines. Furthermore, we explore the challenge of big climate data analysis and the application of novel statistical methods, such as machine learning, in enhancing our understanding of extreme events. Additionally, we address the engagement with different stakeholder groups and the evolving landscape of climate services and private‐sector involvement. We conclude with reflections on the risks and opportunities for early career researchers in navigating these interdisciplinary and societal demands, stressing the importance of meaningful scientific engagement, and removing barriers to inclusivity and collaboration in climate research.

Post-tropical cyclone Fiona and Atlantic Canada: Media framing of hazard risk in the Anthropocene

Post-tropical cyclone Fiona made landfall in Nova Scotia, Canada, in September 2022 with the force of a Category 2 hurricane. Using 'risk society' as an analytical framework, and Thomas A. Birkland's 'focusing event' concept, this paper seeks to understand how publics construct risk in the context of climate change and how institutions engage with those narratives. A qualitative content analysis of 439 newspaper articles from across Canada reveals that most media provide a superficial description of hazard impacts. When media are critical, they connect Fiona to climate change, other extreme events, social vulnerability, and systemic inequality. In response to Fiona and industry trends, insurance representatives indicate a withdraw from covering low-probability, high-consequence events owing to ambiguity in risk analysis and financial interests, complicating hazard relief. Political actors' rhetoric is strong-delivering relief in unprecedented ways and offering new adaptive policy. However, a history of unfulfilled political promises to act on climate change elicits scepticism from media sources.

Exploring ownership of change and health equity implications in neighborhood change processes: A community-led approach to enhancing just climate resilience in Everett, MA

Traditional planning processes have perpetuated the exclusion of historically marginalized communities, imposing vulnerability to climate (health) crises. We investigate how ownership of change fosters equitable climate resilience and community well-being through participatory action research. Our study highlights the detrimental effects of climate gentrification on community advocacy for climate security and health, negatively impacting well-being. We identify three key processes of ownership of change: ownership of social identity, development and decision-making processes, and knowledge. These approaches emphasize community-led solutions to counter climate health challenges and underscore the interdependence of social and environmental factors in mental health outcomes in climate-stressed communities.

Climate Justice Implications of Natech Disasters: Excess Contaminant Releases during Hurricanes on the Texas Gulf Coast

Extreme weather events are becoming more severe due to climate change, increasing the risk of contaminant releases from hazardous sites disproportionately located in low-income communities of color. We evaluated contaminant releases during Hurricanes Rita, Ike, and Harvey in Texas and used regression models to estimate associations between neighborhood racial/ethnic composition and residential proximity to hurricane-related contaminant releases. Two-to-three times as many excess releases were reported during hurricanes compared to business-as-usual periods. Petrochemical manufacturing and refineries were responsible for most air emissions events. Multivariable models revealed sociodemographic disparities in likelihood of releases; compared to neighborhoods near regulated facilities without a release, a one-percent increase in Hispanic residents was associated with a 5 and 10% increase in the likelihood of an air emissions event downwind and within 2 km during Hurricanes Rita and Ike (odds ratio and 95% credible interval= 1.05 [1.00, 1.13], combined model) and Harvey (1.10 [1.00, 1.23]), respectively. Higher percentages of renters (1.07 [1.03, 1.11], combined Rita and Ike model) and rates of poverty (1.06 [1.01, 1.12], Harvey model) were associated with a higher likelihood of a release to land or water, while the percentage of Black residents (0.94 [0.89, 1.00], Harvey model) was associated with a slightly lower likelihood. Population density was consistently associated with a decreased likelihood of a contaminant release to air, land, or water. Our findings highlight social inequalities in the risks posed by natural-technological disasters that disproportionately impact Hispanic, renter, low-income, and rural populations.

Integrating social vulnerability into high-resolution global flood risk mapping

High-resolution global flood risk maps are increasingly used to inform disaster risk planning and response, particularly in lower income countries with limited data or capacity. However, current approaches do not adequately account for spatial variation in social vulnerability, which is a key determinant of variation in outcomes for exposed populations. Here we integrate annual average exceedance probability estimates from a high-resolution fluvial flood model with gridded population and poverty data to create a global vulnerability-adjusted risk index for flooding (VARI Flood) at 90-meter resolution. The index provides estimates of relative risk within or between countries and changes how we understand the geography of risk by identifying 'hotspots' characterised by high population density and high levels of social vulnerability. This approach, which emphasises risks to human well-being, could be used as a complement to traditional population or asset-centred approaches.

Unveiling spatial inequalities: Exploring county-level disaster damages and social vulnerability on public disaster assistance in contiguous US

Understanding the dynamics between public disaster assistance, disaster damages, and social vulnerability at county-level is crucial for designing effective disaster mitigation strategies. This study utilized the Local Bivariate Moran Index (LBMI) and geographically weighted regression (GWR) models to examine spatial patterns and relationships between disaster damages, social vulnerability, and public disaster assistance in contiguous US counties from 2001 to 2021. LBMI results reveal that public disaster assistance has predominantly been directed towards post-disaster recovery efforts, with a particular focus on coastal communities affected by major declared disasters. However, the distributions of public assistance and individual housing assistance, which are the two primary sources of public disaster assistance, do not adequately cover physically and socially vulnerable communities. The distribution of pre-disaster risk mitigation also falls short of sufficiently covering vulnerable communities. Results further indicate the complex interactions between different categories of natural disasters and public assistances. The GWR model results demonstrate spatial variations in predicting each category of public disaster assistance. These findings indicate the need to address disparities in accessing public disaster assistance in the US, and advocate for more equitable disaster mitigation strategies.

Impacts of climate change on the fate of contaminants through extreme weather events

The direct impacts of climate change involve a multitude of phenomena, including rising sea levels, intensified severe weather events such as droughts and flooding, increased temperatures leading to wildfires, and unpredictable fluctuations in rainfall. This comprehensive review intends to examine firstly the probable consequences of climate change on extreme weather events such as drought, flood and wildfire. This review subsequently examines the release and transformation of contaminants in terrestrial, aquatic, and atmospheric environments in response to extreme weather events driven by climate change. While drought and flood influence the dynamics of inorganic and organic contaminants in terrestrial and aquatic environments, thereby influencing their mobility and transport, wildfire results in the release and spread of organic contaminants in the atmosphere. There is a nascent awareness of climate change's influence of climate change-induced extreme weather events on the dynamics of environmental contaminants in the scientific community and decision-making processes. The remediation industry, in particular, lags behind in adopting adaptive measures for managing contaminated environments affected by climate change-induced extreme weather events. However, recognizing the need for assessment measures represents a pivotal first step towards fostering more adaptive practices in the management of contaminated environments. We highlight the urgency of collaboration between environmental chemists and climate change experts, emphasizing the importance of jointly assessing the fate of contaminants and rigorous action to augment risk assessment and remediation strategies to safeguard the health of our environment.

Food retail environments, extreme weather, and their overlap: Exploratory analysis and recommendations for U.S. food policy

Extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and severity due to climate change, yet many of their impacts on human populations are not well understood. We examine the relationship between prior extreme weather events and food environment characteristics. To do so, we conduct a U.S. county-level analysis that assesses the association between extreme weather events and two common food retail environment dimensions. Overall, we find a relationship between higher levels of historic extreme weather exposure and lower food availability and accessibility. In addition, we find heterogeneity in association across the distribution of the number of extreme weather events and event type. Specifically, we find that more localized extreme weather events are more associated with a reduction of access and availability than broad geographic events. Our findings suggest that as extreme weather events amplify in intensity and increase in frequency, new approaches for mitigating less acute and longer-term impacts are needed to address how extreme weather may interact with and reinforce existing disparities in food environment factors. Furthermore, our research argues that integrated approaches to improving vulnerable food retail environments will become an important component of extreme weather planning and should be a consideration in both disaster- and food-related policy.

The global costs of extreme weather that are attributable to climate change

Extreme weather events lead to significant adverse societal costs. Extreme Event Attribution (EEA), a methodology that examines how anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions had changed the occurrence of specific extreme weather events, allows us to quantify the climate change-induced component of these costs. We collect data from all available EEA studies, combine these with data on the socio-economic costs of these events and extrapolate for missing data to arrive at an estimate of the global costs of extreme weather attributable to climate change in the last twenty years. We find that US[Formula: see text] 143 billion per year of the costs of extreme events is attributable to climatic change. The majority (63%), of this is due to human loss of life. Our results suggest that the frequently cited estimates of the economic costs of climate change arrived at by using Integrated Assessment Models may be substantially underestimated.

Resilience patterns of human mobility in response to extreme urban floods

Large-scale disasters can disproportionately impact different population groups, causing prominent disparity and inequality, especially for the vulnerable and marginalized. Here, we investigate the resilience of human mobility under the disturbance of the unprecedented '720' Zhengzhou flood in China in 2021 using records of 1.32 billion mobile phone signaling generated by 4.35 million people. We find that although pluvial floods can trigger mobility reductions, the overall structural dynamics of mobility networks remain relatively stable. We also find that the low levels of mobility resilience in female, adolescent and older adult groups are mainly due to their insufficient capabilities to maintain business-as-usual travel frequency during the flood. Most importantly, we reveal three types of counter-intuitive, yet widely existing, resilience patterns of human mobility (namely, 'reverse bathtub', 'ever-increasing' and 'ever-decreasing' patterns), and demonstrate a universal mechanism of disaster-avoidance response by further corroborating that those abnormal resilience patterns are not associated with people's gender or age. In view of the common association between travel behaviors and travelers' socio-demographic characteristics, our findings provide a caveat for scholars when disclosing disparities in human travel behaviors during flood-induced emergencies.

Determinants of exposure to endocrine disruptors following hurricane Harvey

Hurricane Harvey was a category four storm that induced catastrophic flooding in the Houston metropolitan area. Following the hurricane there was increased concern regarding chemical exposures due to damage caused by flood waters and emergency excess emissions from industrial facilities. This study utilized personal passive samplers in the form of silicone wristbands in Houston, TX to both assess chemical exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) immediately after the hurricane and determine participant characteristics associated with higher concentrations of exposure. Participants from the Houston-3H cohort (n = 172) wore a wristband for seven days and completed a questionnaire to determine various flood-related and demographic variables. Bivariate and multivariate analysis indicated that living in an area with a high Area Deprivation Index (ADI) (indicative of low socioeconomic status), identifying as Black/African American or Latino, and living in the Houston neighborhoods of Baytown and East Houston were associated with increased exposure to EDCs. These results provide evidence of racial/ethnic and socioeconomic injustices in exposure to EDCs in the Houston Metropolitan Area. Since the multiple regression models conducted did not fully explain exposure (0.047 < R2 < 0.34), more research is needed on the direct sources of EDCs within this area to create effective exposure mitigation strategies.

Are Women More Vulnerable to Flooding Than Men in an Aging Japanese Society?

It is a well-accepted notion that women are more vulnerable to natural disasters than men, especially in developing countries. However, in developed countries, how women's empowerment by economic and social development has reduced the gender gap in vulnerability remains insufficiently answered. As Japan passed its golden age, moving into an aging society, a study on how the gender difference in flood vulnerability has evolved can contribute to a better understanding of the types and causes of vulnerability, leading to better flood risk management in a new social context. Following this thinking, the present study conducted a longitudinal analysis using representative flooding cases in Japan over a period of forty years. It found that the women's fatality rate increased with age much faster than men's in the 1980s but reversed in a recent major flood disaster. It also revealed that most flood disaster victims were elderly in recent years. These findings suggest that the flood vulnerability at present is more driven by age-related physical ability decline, much less relevant to gender. Based on the results, it proposed a new framework for assessing flood vulnerability in an aging society. Such outcomes can help with the better formulation of flood management policies and probing into solutions.