When climate disasters hit, people of color fare worse. This professor has ideas about how to help.

Robert Bullard at Texas Southern University studies urban planning and climate justice.

By Sarah AschJuly 11, 2024 12:27 pm, ,

As people in Houston and along the Texas coast take steps to recover from Hurricane Beryl, some people have turned their eyes to the rest of hurricane season. Experts have predicted this is going to be one of the most intense hurricane seasons to hit the Atlantic.

And as weather gets more extreme, the reality is not everyone is affected the same way by major weather events. Research has repeatedly shown that communities of color are hit harder by climate events, and Texas is no exception.

Robert Bullard, the founding director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University in Houston, said a lot of this comes down to where people live.

“(It’s related to) the extent to which planning and land uses have been allocated for people who have fewer resources and political power,” he said. “There’s a direct connection between which communities have been impacted by all kinds of environmental stressors, including flooding, heat waves, etc.”

» RELATED: Tropical Storm Beryl: How to get help and help Texans

Bullard said Houston is a good example of this disparity. For a long time people of color could only live in certain areas and those areas are often in flood plains, next to sources of pollution or don’t have infrastructure to protect against weather catastrophes. 

“America is segregated and so is pollution, and so is the vulnerability to climate change,” Bullard said.

“If you map the vulnerability, you’ll see that it maps very neatly with other kinds of vulnerability in terms of which communities don’t have trees – if you don’t have lots of green canopy then it is hotter there – which communities have not had tax dollars spent for infrastructure to harden them from disasters… And again, the flood map and the flood zones and the pollution zones and the sacrifice zones map closely with race, ethnicity and income.”

Beyond just where people live, people who are vulnerable because of things like health conditions will also be negatively impacted by events like power outages. 

“When you lose power, it’s more than just losing power. If you are dependent on a machine that uses electricity for your medical devices, then you are most likely not to have good health and looking at elevated health disparities, underlying health conditions,” Bullard said. “When you have these outages, it disproportionately impacts people of color and people who are more likely to have more underlying health conditions.”

As climate change makes weather events more extreme, Bullard said Texans have to prepare for disasters all year around.

“We used to plan for disasters June through November, during hurricane season. But now we have to plan for disasters from January to January. Winter Storm Uri hit us in February 2021,” he said.

“We have to plan for these disasters and plan for building resilience and not just be haphazard. We have to move fast toward clean energy and building more resilient communities away from areas that are more prone to flooding. And we have to talk about building healthy, resilient communities that are much fairer. And so it means that resources have to be applied fairly.”

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Bullard said in the 45 years he was been working on these issues, he has seen two executive orders signed to address climate injustice. Bill Clinton signed one in 1994, and Joe Biden signed one in April 2023.

“The first executive order, there was not one dime for environmental or climate justice. In 2023, we have $369 billion under the Inflation Reduction Act to deal with climate issues and environmental justice and building resilience,” he said. “So we have resources available today. The problem is to make sure that those resources get deployed in a way to address these long overdue disparities in addressing the equity issues that have gone on for many decades.”

Bullard said this will take both federal and state action to achieve — and he advocated for connecting Texas to a broader energy grid. 

“We have to make sure that we build equity and justice into how we build back, how we recover, and not just allow money to follow money,” he said. “We have to talk about looking long term – the fact that Texas is not connected to the national grid. We have to talk about what happens when the power goes out in the whole state, and do we have anybody to look to, to assist us?

We are one nation, and that should be connected. Just like the interstate highways, our energy grid needs to be connected to the same extent that we are connected as states.”

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