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Redlined, now flooding

Homes in redlined neighborhoods are 25% more likely to be flooded, according to a report from the real estate firm Redfin – and Sacramento had the highest racial flood risk disparity in its analysis. Overlaying current flood risk assessments with maps of which neighborhoods were excluded from public investment via New Deal-era programs because of their high Black and immigrant populations — known as redlining — shows how the effects of those racist policies persist today. More than 1 in 5 homes (21.6%) in Sacramento’s formerly redlined neighborhoods face a high risk of flooding today, but in formerly greenlined areas, just 11.8% of homes face the same risk. Flood risk today isn’t race blind: Investments in sewers, levees and other infrastructure rescued some neighborhoods from flooding but left others behind. Systemic factors that guided investment exposed Black and Brown households to more severe flood risk. A vicious cycle of segregation and disinvestment reinforced the linkage between race and flood risk. (Bloomberg) Screenshot: University of Richmond’s Mapping Inequality project

Climate change and soaring flood insurance premiums could trigger another mortgage crisis

FEMA is revamping the debt-ridden National Flood Insurance Program to make it operate like a private insurer, raising concerns that coverage could become unaffordable for many higher-risk areas across the country. Cities are worried that this could trigger a foreclosure crisis, especially in low-income, high-risk neighborhoods. (Vox) Photo Credit: Jorge Garcia for Vox/CPI

California’s wildfire smoke could be more harmful than vehicle emissions, study says

The wildfire smoke that shrouds California each autumn and winter could be more harmful to humans than pollution from cars and other sources, a new study has found. Tiny, toxic particles spewed by wind-whipped wildfires resulted in 10 times as many hospitalizations due to respiratory illness as compared to other types of pollution, researchers found in the study. The findings add to growing evidence that extreme fires, fueled by climate change, will have increasingly dire health consequences for residents in the western US. The pollution disproportionately impacts low-wage workers, and poor communities of color across the state who are already exposed to high levels of pollution from other sources including factories, highways and refineries. (Guardian)

California sets home hardening standards to lower fire risks

As consecutive years of catastrophic wildfires in California drive up the cost of insuring homes, state regulators announced a step toward creating incentives for retrofitting older homes to make them more resilient to fires. Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara said his office will work with four state agencies charged with wildfire response and prevention to establish statewide standards for home hardening — from replacing single to dual-paned windows to creating fire-resistant landscaping — that he hopes will reduce wildfire risks and make insurance more affordable and available in California. The move comes as insurance providers increasingly drop coverage in fire-prone regions of the state. (AP) Photo Credit: AP, Noah Berger

California AG challenges housing plans in wildfire areas

California’s attorney general is challenging some of the state’s largest suburban development projects as local officials weigh the risk of increasingly devastating wildfires against the state’s dire need for more housing. Attorney General Xavier Becerra backed lawsuits opposing San Diego County’s approval of environmental reviews for two projects in a very high wildfire hazard zone southeast of San Diego. Last month Becerra backed court challenges alleging that Lake County officials failed to properly take into account the increased wildfire risk from approving 1,400 homes, 850 hotel rooms and resort apartments and other resort amenities on the 16,000-acre Guenoc Valley Ranch. Becerra is acting under a 2018 update to CEQA, which created new standards for officials to analyze whether development projects will increase wildfire risks. (AP)

Summers could last for half the year by 2100

Our summers are already about 20% longer than they used to be, and if the climate crisis continues unabated then northern hemisphere summers could cover nearly half of the year by 2100, making them more than twice as long as they were in the 1950s. The average northern hemisphere summer has grown from 78 to 95 days between 1952 and 2011, while winter has shrunk from 76 to 73 days. Future summers could last an average of 166 days by 2100, squeezing out all the other seasons and shrinking winter to just 31 days. (Link) Photo: Onsets and lengths of the four seasons in 1952, 2011, 2050, and 2100. The top row is from HadGHCND, and the bottom row is from RCP8.5. HadGHCND, Hadley Centre’s Global Historical Climatology Network Daily; RCP, representative concentration pathways.

Already hit hard by pandemic, Black and Hispanic communities suffer the blows of an unforgiving winter storm

Texans of color, disproportionately devastated by death and unemployment during the last year, tend to live in neighborhoods with older homes, more vulnerable pipes and fewer food options. That’s made it harder to withstand the cold temperatures and power outages. (Texas Tribune) Photo Credit Ben Torres for The Texas Tribune

Texas blackouts point to coast-to-coast crises waiting to happen

Even as Texas struggled to restore electricity and water over the past week, signs of the risks posed by increasingly extreme weather to America’s aging infrastructure were cropping up across the country. One-third of oil production in the nation was halted. Drinking-water systems in Ohio were knocked offline. Road networks nationwide were paralyzed and vaccination efforts in 20 states were disrupted. As climate change brings more frequent and intense storms, floods, heat waves, wildfires and other extreme events, it is placing growing stress on the foundations of the country’s economy: Its network of roads and railways, drinking-water systems, power plants, electrical grids, industrial waste sites and even homes. Failures in just one sector can set off a domino effect of breakdowns in hard-to-predict ways. (NYT)

Mountain snowpack most at-risk from climate change

In a new study published, climate scientists with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that as temperatures rise, the timing of snowpack disappearance is changing most rapidly in coastal US and the south, with smaller changes in the northern interior of the country. This means that snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas, the Cascades, and the mountains of southern Arizona is much more vulnerable to rising temperatures than snowpack found in places like the Rockies or the mountains of Utah. Scientists theorize that changes in the amount of time that snow can accumulate and the amount of time the surface is covered with snow during the year are the critical reasons why some regions are more vulnerable to snowpack melt than others. (NOAA) Photo Credit: Carol M. Highsmith.

Adaptation can compound climate change impacts on energy and water

A recent study published in Environmental Research Letters presents a framework that outlines the links between and vulnerabilities of California’s energy and water systems. The findings can be used to evaluate how both climate change and our adaptation decisions might affect the interconnected systems. It’s a first and an “exhaustive” quantification of the linkages between energy and water. (EOS)

They’re among the world’s oldest living things. The climate crisis is killing them.

They are what scientists call charismatic megaflora, and there are few trees anywhere more charismatic than the three most famous species in California. People travel from around the world simply to walk among them in wonderment. The giant sequoia. The Joshua tree. The coast redwood. Scientists already feared for their future. Then came 2020. These losses, and the losses likely to come, are not something to be measured in mere acres. (NYT) Photo credit: Joel Quizon/EyeEm, via Getty Images

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