“We’re writing about children and seniors (like you) being vulnerable in a disaster,” says Buddy. “Don’t forget pets!”
Flooding and fires, heat and storms - those are the surface threats from climate disasters. But they create real disaster only when they hit us personally, in our finances, our lifestyles, our health, our environment. That personal impact is much more likely in some localities than others.
Consider a storm that affects homes, businesses, and public amenities in two adjacent towns.
Town A residents received government warnings and stayed safe. In Town B, several families heard no warnings. Some didn’t protect their property. Some were injured trying to get to safety during the storm, as were the rescue teams trying to help.
Town A’s businesses and homes were well built and stormwater did little structural damage, mostly flooding basements. In Town B the same flooding pushed many buildings off their foundations or knocked them down.
In Town A, property and flood insurance claims paid for a big chunk of the physical damage; in Town B most property owners had no insurance.
It’s easy to see the difference in physical vulnerability, but the not-so-obvious reasons behind this difference lie in people’s behavior. Over the past few decades, state and town officials have added a new factor to their disaster planning and prevention plans: Social Vulnerability (SV). We can look it up county by county, and it’s now incorporated as a threat multiplier in the National Risk Index, introduced in a previous ClimateDog letter. It may be the single most salient indicator of the economic risk and social distress from a climate disaster, more important than physical risk.
WHAT ARE THESE SOCIAL RISKS?
Here are the categories of risk defined within Social Vulnerability, which can turn a nuisance in Town A into a disaster in Town B.
Socioeconomic The poor are less likely to have the income or assets needed to prepare for a possible disaster or to recover after a disaster. Although the dollar value of their property may be less than that of other households, it likely represents a larger proportion of their household assets. The poor are less likely to have property or health insurance. And the municipalities and organizations in poor areas are less likely to come up with the money for restoration.
Household composition During and after a disaster, children, seniors, single-parent households, and people with disabilities are more likely to require financial support, transportation, medical care, or assistance with ordinary daily activities.
Minority status / language Social and economic marginalization of some racial and ethnic groups, including real estate discrimination, has made them more vulnerable at all stages of disasters. For instance, disaster warnings and offers of assistances are less reliable where English is not the first language and residents rely on their social network for news rather than the broadcast media.
Housing / transportation The poor often live in more weakly constructed houses or mobile homes that are especially vulnerable to strong storms. Automobile ownership is generally lower. Easy evacuation by interstate highways or public transportation may not be available.
These vulnerabilities are not often mentioned as climate risks. Our flood maps and storm forecasts don’t tell us about the likelihood of personal injury, financial hardship, delayed rebuilding, or permanent blight. Or about the less-than-obvious impact of a flood on local healthcare, business activity, tax base, dog parks, and the town’s ability to attract residents and businesses.
HOW DISASTER OFFICIALS USE SV MEASURES
The CDC’s SV databases and maps are being used, mostly BEFORE a disaster, to:
Estimate the amount of needed supplies like food, water, medicine, and bedding.
Help decide how many emergency personnel are required to assist people.
Identify areas in need of emergency shelters.
Plan the best way to evacuate people, accounting for those who have special needs, such as people without vehicles, the elderly, or people who do not understand English well.
Identify communities that will need extra funding and support before, during, and after a disaster.
HOW OUR LOCAL OFFICIALS SHOULD USE SV MEASURES
Looking at Social Vulnerability can show us what to expect during our town’s recovery AFTER a disaster. With thought and effort, we may see how to avoid the problems. What is the likelihood that
rebuilding by residents will be stalled for lack of funds from insurance, family savings, or earnings?
disaster injuries will cost the town healthcare dollars, lost productivity, and social animosities?
business income and jobs will be lost?
a high percentage of homes will be damaged enough to require rebuilding, not repair?
neighbors will spend extra time giving day-to-day personal assistance to neighbors?
fundraising will become a necessity for many families?
the damage and economic decline will long be visible?
These questions go to the heart of that concept called resilience. We use resilience a lot when discussing climate change, but we seldom find someone describing it. Try defining it as the opposite of vulnerabilities - the other side of the coin - and we can see many of the specific problems that need preparation before our community can quickly bounce back from a disaster. These are the specific problems that we should be pushing our town leaders to work on. Do they know, for instance, about available public funding programs aimed at reducing disaster risk ahead of time? (Buddy’s been researching this. We’ll have more on these funds in a future letter.)
The impact of disaster damage and suffering, much of it hidden, among our fellow residents can be large. And those costs hurt everybody. Years and decades from now, when our children look back on this period of growing climate crisis, they will likely view the damage to individuals, families, and the social order as far more painful and lasting than what happens to the physical objects around them. And they may look back with appreciation on those of us who focused our mitigation efforts on those social threats - today.
LEARN, THINK, ACT
We can check the Social Vulnerability of any American county. It’s interesting to bring up this map alongside the National Risk Index map and see how many counties with relatively low physical risks have high social risks, and vice versa.
Pre-Disaster Mitigation and other funds aimed at reducing disaster risk ahead of time are discussed by the Center for Sustainable Community Design. They offer an excellent collection, Examples of Best Practices, on countering social vulnerability in representative American cities, though it concentrates more on use of SV before, rather than after, disasters.
What goes into calculating social vulnerability is discussed in A Social Vulnerability Index for Disaster Management, Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management 2011
Social costs are discussed as thoroughly as physical costs in my book, Climate-Proof Your Personal Finances, How (and where) to safeguard your family’s budget and lifestyle.
Social Vulnerability is just one of the many measures of how climate-proof a community is. See others listed in Buddy’s and my letter on identifying climate-proof hometowns.