Environmental Injustice in the Disaster Cycle: Hurricane Harvey and the Texas Gulf Coast

Abstract

We apply an environmental justice lens to synthesize knowledge of disparities experienced by Hurricane Harvey survivors based on race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES) across the disaster phases. We focus on the Texas Gulf Coast, which hosts the largest petrochemical industrial complex in the United States and experienced Harvey-induced flooding in 2017, precipitating a naturaltechnological (na-tech) disaster. We review studies that have examined race/ethnicity-and/or SESbased disparities in each of Harvey's phases (i.e., mitigation, preparedness, physical impacts, health impacts, response, and recovery). Before Harvey, racial/ethnic minority and low SES populations had constrained access to resources for mitigating flood/hurricane hazards and exhibited less disaster preparedness relative to White and higher SES populations. The physical and health impacts associated with Harvey disproportionately affected minority and low SES groups. In addition, minority and low SES populations experienced heightened challenges in responding to and recovering from Harvey. Disparities documented within each phase of Harvey likely cascaded across this event for minority and low SES survivors, accumulating disadvantage in a manner that compounded their experiences of injustice. Patterns of na-tech disaster injustice in Harvey reflect preexisting racial/economic segregation and inequality along the Texas Gulf Coast and mirror patterns observed in Hurricane Katrina. Such disaster injustices derive from features shared by many U.S. Gulf Coast communities, including the presence of weak planning institutions, exploitative industries, degraded environments, spatial segregation, and stark inequalities. Thus, ameliorating regional disaster injustices requires tackling those root causes, while simultaneously improving organizational capabilities for disaster mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.

Social Inequity and Wildfire Response: Identifying Gaps and Interventions in Ventura County, California

“…Racial discrimination and systemic exclusion can impact adaptive capacity and increase vulnerability [6]. Natural disaster response disparities due to race are attributable to racial and ethnic discrimination, inequities in political power and access to social services, and inaccessible disaster communications and recovery fund-ing [4,10,26,29]. This project's results, coupled with existing literature, imply that wildfire managers and planners must address and compensate for the barriers to resilience caused by social inequity in planning and communications [6].…”

“…Socially marginalized groups are not a monolith, and planners must consider the distinct needs of each community. Residents who identify with multiple marginalized community groups can face amplified vulnerabilities to disasters due to these overlapping identities [4,5,28,29]. For example, a Latina woman may face heightened vulnerability compared to a white woman, due to the dual hinderances of social marginalization via ethnicity and gender on her ability to respond to and recover from a wildfire.…”

“…The undocumented population in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties is estimated at over 9 percent [5]. Research on wildfire recovery in Ventura shows that Mexican Indigenous (including Mixtec) undocumented communities do not receive adequate communications regarding wildfire threat and do not qualify for federal aid [29,32].…”

Social Inequalities in Climate Change-Attributed Impacts of Hurrican Harvey

“…Then, using multi-variate econometric regression models, we assess what social and demographic factors are associated with these climate change-induced impacts, thereby carrying out the first analysis of inequalities in climate change attributed impacts of extreme weather events. Our analysis is based on a census of approximately 1.1 million residential land parcels nested within 795 census tracts (i.e., neighborhoods) in Harris County, Texas -the largest county of the Houston metropolitan area that was among the hardest-hit areas by Hurricane Harvey (Chakraborty, Collins, and Grineski 2019;Flores et al 2020;Smiley 2020).…”

Social inequalities in climate change-attributed impacts of Hurricane Harvey

“…Then, using multivariable econometric regression models, we assess what social and demographic factors are associated with these climate change-induced impacts, thereby carrying out an original analysis of inequalities in climate change-attributed impacts of extreme weather events. Our analysis is based on a census of approximately 1.1 million residential land parcels located within 795 census tracts (i.e., neighborhoods) in Harris County, Texas-the largest county of the Houston metropolitan area that was among the hardest-hit areas by Hurricane Harvey [17][18][19] .…”