Does climate change affect everyone equally? Not really.
As Texas continues to get slammed by unmatched heatwaves, history-making hurricanes, and deadly winter blasts, it’s a reality Texas legislators will have to reckon with — and one that is increasingly important as extreme weather in Texas intensifies.
Climate change continues to redefine what’s normal for Texas weather, said Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon during a panel discussion Friday at the 2024 Texas Tribune Festival.
Texans should also expect increased drought severity, more triple-digit days, a significant increase in urban flooding, more intense hurricanes and larger storm surges over the next three decades, according to an updated report by Nielsen-Gammon and funded by the bipartisan policy-focused nonprofit Texas 2036.
That means it will become even more important for solution drivers, such as legislators and nonprofits, to focus future recovery efforts through a lens focused on equity, said Nielsen-Gammon’s fellow panelists John Schwartz, a journalism professor at the University of Texas, and Lesley Briones, a Harris County Commissioner.
“When … I talk about equity issues with extreme weather, what people will say is, ‘Oh, come on — a hurricane hits everybody, everybody suffers when a hurricane hits,’ but not everybody gets hit the same way and feels it the same way,” Schwartz said.
Briones agreed, noting that she noticed when hurricanes Harvey and Beryl struck the Houston area, the 13 most affected zip codes in Harris County were also the areas with the highest social vulnerability index. The SVI uses data from the U.S. Census Bureau to rank census tracts on 14 social factors including poverty, lack of vehicle access, crowded housing, minority status and household composition.
Both Bexar and Harris counties rank in the 92 percentile on the index, indicating a high level of vulnerability.
Schwartz also noted that poorer neighborhoods are usually much hotter than richer residential neighborhoods, a phenomenon driven by the urban heat island effect, which sees neighborhoods with fewer trees and more concrete hold more heat than greener neighborhoods with more trees.
The phenomenon has been mapped out in San Antonio showing that most of the hot spots are located within Loop 1604, increasingly so within Loop 410.
Earlier this summer, the San Antonio Report looked at which parts of the city are most affected by heat according to climate experts, with a heat map created by Climate Central showing that 67% of people experience more intense heat across the city’s urban heat hot spots.
“I always tell my students in environmental journalism, ‘People talk about structural racism — but racism is actually structural, it is in the actual structures and in the construction of our cities through redlining,'” Schwartz said.
Redlining is the historic and illegal practice of denying people access to credit in certain poorer neighborhoods, even if they are personally qualified for loans.
Briones added that she feels it is time for state legislators to start being more forward-thinking and preventative than reactive, saying that it’s expensive — both in dollars and in human capital — to be reactive to climate change.
To do that, people need to start looking at a more extreme weather future, Nielsen-Gammon said.
“The past is no longer reliably what the future is going to look like, and we have to deal with that no matter what,” he said.
