Environmental Justice and social vulnerability
When investigating feedbacks between humans and freshwater systems, it's critical to think about how accessible freshwater resources—and the services that freshwater resources provide—are to different populations. I have thought about these questions both at my post-doc at UVM and through research funded by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center.
Social vulnerability framework for flooding events in the United States
Climate disasters, like flooding, are increasing across the United States and the impacts from those disasters, such as property damage and lives lost, disproportionately affect vulnerable communities. Vulnerable communities are often low-income and people of color due to historic disinvestment, including lower access to nature and green infrastructure compared to higher income and white populations. Vulnerability to flooding events is often only defined through exposure pathways, meaning vulnerable communities are only considered to be those living within floodplains where flood disasters have occurred in the past. However, during my post-doc, I have explored a multi-faceted view of vulnerability that questions who is likely to be exposed and susceptible to hazards as well as who is slower to recover in a hazard’s aftermath and why (Fig. 1).
Fig 1. The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report outlines three dimensions of vulnerability including exposure, susceptibility, and adaptive capacity. I explore the underlying conditions that cause individuals to experience high exposure and susceptibility to a flooding event as well as low adaptive capacity to a flooding event.
Disparities in the benefits of stream restoration projects
Within the past century, most urban streams have experienced modifications to their hydrology, geomorphology, and biogeochemistry. Stream restoration projects attempt to restore urban streams but often only include project goals focused on biophysical and geomorphological changes, disregarding any social implications of their work.
Many scientific researchers have pointed out the injustices that can occur when only environmental factors are considered and have even demonstrated that restoration projects fail without input from multiple stakeholders and communities.
In a project funded by SESYNC, I have worked with a diverse team of researchers (learn more about them below) to take an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the implications of stream restoration work.
Example research questions from this project are included below:
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Where are stream restoration projects most often sited and who has access to the benefits of these projects?
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How can we measure different social implications of stream restoration work? Some examples from the literature include:
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Recognition justice, which is the level of acknowledgement of views and opinions of various stakeholders
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Participatory justice, which is how equitably and transparently project goals and ideas were decided and agreed upon by various stakeholders
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Distributive justice, which is how equitably outcomes are distributed to various communities
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How do differences in engagement with these different forms of justice in stream restoration project objectives influence both the environmental and societal outcomes of the stream restoration project?
This project is in collaboration with five other researchers including: my co-team leader, Lucy Andrews (University of California - Berkeley), Vincent Chireh (The University of British Columbia - Vancouver), Jabari Jones (University of Minnesota - Twin Cities), Nada Saidi (University of Dundee, Scotland), and Jenny Rempel (University of California - Berkeley).
Funding acknowledgments:
Research on disparities in stream restoration project siting is funded by National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) under funding received from the National Science Foundation DBI-1639145. You can read more about the SESYNC Graduate Pursuit Program here.
Research on social vulnerability to flood disasters is funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), awarded to the Cooperative Institute for Research on Hydrology (CIROH) through the NOAA Cooperative Agreement with The University of Alabama, NA22NWS4320003. You can read more about other funded CIROH projects here. You can read more about CIROH-related events at UVM here.
Want to learn more? Check out my blog posts for updates.
