Flooding Risk and Environmental Justice
26 Sep 2015A fantastic open access article in Environmental Research Letters explores the consequences of flood risk by socioeconomic group. The study focuses on the Miami-Dade MSA and provides an assessment showing racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to see increased flood risk that poorer communities:
Furthermore, the inequitable exposure of neighborhoods with greater percentages of non-Hispanic Blacks, Hispanics as a whole, and the Hispanic subgroup of Puerto Ricans to inland flooding suggests that these socially vulnerable residents are residing in flood zones that lack indivisible water-related amenities. Amenities associated with coastal flood zones must outweigh the hazards if individuals of lower social vulnerability, such as non-Hispanic Whites and those with lower neighborhood deprivation, reside there. Conversely, racial/ethnic minority and low-income residents are often constrained in their choices for housing location and thus relegated to neighborhoods exposed to inland flood risk that lack water-related amenities.
This is part of a growing body of literature on the distributional effects of natural disasters. With respect to flooding, there’s Affordability of National Flood Insurance Program Premiums, the Massachusetts study I blogged about in June, and my own dissertation, among others.