The climate vulnerability gap: Developing a metric to advance racial equity and more just climate investment
Earlier this year, we hit a milestone that should get everyone's attention: July 2024 marked the first full 12-month period in which global temperatures averaged 1.64 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial-era temperatures. For the U.S., the temperature increase has brought a more unstable climate with frequent and increasingly compounding disasters, from hurricanes and flooding to extreme heat.
While climate change is caused by greenhouse gas emissions warming the atmosphere, many of the growing impacts of climate change are social and economic. For the most vulnerable communities, these alarming impacts aren't a future problem-they're being felt now, and innovative policy is desperately needed to ensure that they do not undermine progress in social and racial justice. To develop effective climate adaptation policy, including targeting investments to the communities that need them most, policymakers-both lawmakers and executives-need empirical tools to understand the distribution of climate risks, vulnerability, and resilience by race, ethnicity, and place.
But national, state, and local policymakers, while broadly aware of the need for adaptation in vulnerable communities, lack the information to make the most informed choices, especially about opportunities for alignment: how and where to invest scarce public resources in ways that can reduce climate vulnerabilities while furthering racial equity and economic mobility. While tools do exist to identify vulnerable groups and communities, none communicate climate action as a tool for racial justice. New empirical tools are needed for local governance that can expand how climate action is communicated for a variety of racial groups. This includes highlighting the role that disasters, heatwaves, and other climate-related risks play in amplifying barriers to racial progress, and illustrating how policymakers can align investments in climate action with goals for inclusive economic development.
Tracking racial gaps in climate vulnerability and resilience could help do this. Put simply, "vulnerability" refers to the exposure and sensitivity of communities and households to risks before an extreme event occurs. Social factors such as low household wealth and income, and environmental ones such as aging housing, can make households more vulnerable to disasters and climate extremes. "Resilience," meanwhile, refers to the capacity of a community, infrastructure, or individual to prepare for, cope with, and recover from an extreme event. Measuring racial gaps in both could provide another policy tool to assess racial progress alongside other metrics.
To help meet this challenge, this report explores a new concept: "the climate vulnerability gap," an empirical tool to gauge racial progress in climate policy and action. The report explores this concept by linking the U.S. Climate Vulnerability Index, created by the Environmental Defense Fund and Texas A&M University, with Census Bureau demographic data from the American Community Survey. The preliminary evidence in this report shows:
- Significant gaps in climate vulnerability by race and ethnicity exist, including at the national, regional, state, and city levels, regardless of regional differences in hazards or the demographic makeup of places. While this is a relative measure of vulnerability, the gaps are substantial, indicating an increased likelihood that extreme weather will generate financial distress, loss of assets, or dangerous health impacts in those communities.
- Rather than exposure to extreme climate events, these gaps are driven primarily by racial differences in underlying social vulnerability, such as health risks and housing insecurity-indicating the large role that these factors play in amplifying climate risk for nonwhite communities.
- Despite the race-based gaps in vulnerability, they are averages only; there are also many Black- and/or Latino or Hispanic-majority cities and towns (meaning that residents identifying as Black or Latino or Hispanic alone or in combination represent the majority demographic) where climate vulnerability is lower than the regional average. These relatively less vulnerable communities are spread across the U.S., but are concentrated in Washington, D.C., Virginia, Maryland, Michigan, and Northern California.
The remainder of this report presents these findings in more detail and demonstrates the potential benefits of adopting intersectional measures of climate impacts and risks such as this, including helping inform local and state planning for adaptation and resilience.