Events

Past Event

LDEO Earth Science Colloquium with Marco Tedesco

October 1, 2021
3:30 PM - 4:30 PM
America/New_York
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, 61 Route 9W, Palisades, NY 10964

LDEO Earth Science Colloquium presents:

Addressing climate impacts on socially vulnerable populations through national risk indices, housing and racial data: A test case in Miami, Florida

with Marco Tedesco, Lamont Research Professor, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

 

Over the past decades sea level rise has been accelerating, strongly driven by ocean thermal expansion and the melting ice. Concurrently, several extreme events have exposed several communities to floods, wildfires, droughts and heatwaves, to name a few. While the financial and economic sectors are beginning to develop adaptation tools to address medium to long-term impacts, the social reverberations of the shocks associated with climate change are already perceived by the socio-vulnerable populations. For example, recent work shows that people of color are more likely to live in high-risk flood zones and, often, cannot afford insurance. 

A new mechanism that is threatening socially vulnerable people is surfacing in Miami and Florida through the systematic and unconditional increase in rental prices and the number of filed evictions. The neighborhood of Little River, Miami is the canary in the mine. Here the process described above has displaced thousands of people, adding the climate component to the gentrification process already occurring. The reason for this is the appetite of land speculators to purchase property that is ‘climate-sheltered’, like Little River. 

In this presentation, I will tell the story of Little River as an example of how gentrification is reinforced and promoted by the perception and acknowledgment of climate change impacts, specifically flood in this case. I will introduce a new dataset that we built at Lamont to approach the gentrification problem from a quantitative perspective and discuss ‘climate gentrification’. I will describe the core datasets used to build our database, such as the newly released FEMA National Risk Index, the House Mortgage Disclosure Act data and the Evictions dataset. 

Lastly, I will also show preliminary results over the New York City area expanding the analysis to risks beyond floods (e.g. hurricane, heatwave, etc.) on socially vulnerable people, from a racial perspective. I will discuss initial results on the sensitivity of different ethnic groups to climate risks in the NYC area and their geographic distribution. I will conclude the talk with future plans.

 

 

This week’s Colloquium will be held in-person in Monell Auditorium at 3:30 pm (masks required), with an additional option to stream the lecture if you do not wish to join us in person.  Zoom link will be provided the week of the lecture.

Contact Information

Nicolas Young