As rising seas threaten to flood hundreds of toxic sites along the coast of the U.S. state of California, the risk of flood-related contamination will fall disproportionately on the state’s most marginalized communities, a new study led by researchers at the University of California (UC), Berkeley and Los Angeles, has suggested.
The study identified 736 facilities at risk of coastal flooding and an additional 173 with projected groundwater encroachment under California’s high-risk aversion scenario, which projects that sea levels could rise by more than six feet by the end of the century.
“We looked at various measures of marginalization and vulnerability, and found that people of color and households living in poverty were more likely to live near (within one km) potentially hazardous sites at risk of future flood,” Lara Cushing, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, told Xinhua in an interview on Friday.
The study found residents living within one kilometer of at-risk sites were more likely than others to be people of color, to be living below the poverty line, to be unemployed or to experience another form of social disadvantage such as linguistic isolation.
“Sea level rise is like a slow moving storm that we can anticipate and prepare for. As California invests in community resilience to climate change, it is essential that considerations of environmental justice are at the fore,” said Rachel Morello-Frosch, a professor of public health and of environmental science, policy and management at UC Berkeley and senior author of the paper.
Low-income communities and communities of color already face disproportionate exposure to myriad environmental pollutants, and the threat of additional exposures from sea-level rise will only exacerbate these inequities, according to the study, published in Environmental Science & Technology.
Compared to their neighbors, socially vulnerable residents can also face more challenges to evacuate during a flood and often experience social stressors that can make them more susceptible to the health impacts of pollutant exposures, the study suggested.
“Climate change disproportionally impacts low wealth communities and communities of color in the United States. We see that during heat waves, wildfires, and extreme flood events,” Cushing told Xinhua.
“Unless action is taken to increase climate resilience in marginalized communities, sea level rise is likely to widen existing disparities in exposure to environmental health hazards,” she noted.
It is already displacing communities — especially indigenous communities in places like Alaska and Louisiana — whose homes have become untenable due to sea level rise, according to Cushing.
