Rising sea levels due to climate change-induced global warming could leave the coastal communities at the risk of isolation by disrupting transportation networks and roads, meaning that those affected lose access to essential locations such as critical emergency services and schools, a study has said.
It further exposed that renters and older adults face a greater risk of isolation, highlighting the growing connection between historical drivers of existing social inequality and the groups that incur the most risk of climate change.
According to Kelsea Best, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University, the first step in better characterizing these threats is changing how researchers assess community risk, as most studies measure this by exclusively determining impacts via direct flooding. But concentrating on this sole measurement neglects more complex aftereffects of sea level rise, such as isolation, and reinforces inequality in coastal areas, Best said.
“We need to re-conceptualize how we measure who is burdened by sea level rise because there are so many ways that people might be burdened before their home is flooded,“ she said.
Best and her colleagues argue that an inability to reach essential places like grocery stores, public schools, hospitals and fire stations impacts individuals just as negatively as if they were living in inundated homes themselves, and should be documented as such.
Most importantly, their results expose one of the main reasons for these vast differences in risk: A group’s risk of isolation is intimately entwined with specific road networks and where vital services are located in relation to where affected individuals reside.
“If we take a one-size-fits-all approach, or a seemingly ‘neutral’ approach to understanding who gets access to safe, affordable housing and community in a world with climate change, then we’re really just exacerbating these inequities and it’s not good enough,” said Best. “We have to deliberately seek to provide access to adaptation resources to groups of people who have historically been left out and therefore have fewer resources to respond in the first place.”
Alarmingly, the study found strong evidence that these isolation effects would set in by 2120 in the intermediate scenario and as early as 2090 in the high scenario. “This timeline matters from a planning and adaptation perspective,” said Best. “Part of why we included the temporal piece is to say this issue would not be as much of a problem if we had urgent, aggressive mitigation.
“The effects of climate change are going to be further reaching and more cascading than might be directly obvious, and those effects are not going to be felt equitably,” said Best. “So we need to be thinking about those populations most at risk from the beginning and develop policies to support them.”
