Redlined Homes Face Higher Flood Risk: Homes in redlined neighborhoods are 25% more likely to be flooded, according to a report from the real estate firm Redfin. Climate change, caused by burning fossil fuels like gas, oil, and coal, is increasing U.S. flooding risk, and the report is yet another example of the compounding harms caused by racism and climate change. Overlaying current flood risk assessments with maps of which neighborhoods were excluded from public investment via New Deal-era programs because of their high Black and immigrant populations — the racist practice known as redlining for the color in which those neighborhoods were delineated on federal maps — shows how the effects of those racist policies persist today. “The discrimination that happened in the past may seem like it happened a long time ago, but it compounds,” Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather told CNN. “It’s not like the historical practices that were discriminatory diminished in effect. It seems like they actually increase in effect.” The population of redlined areas today are 58.1% Black, Indigenous, and people of color compared to 40.4% in places deemed desirable by lenders, the report found. The report comes as E&E reports FEMA is beginning to evaluate not just how disasters disproportionately burden low-income people and people of color, but how disaster response has exacerbated those inequities. (Redlined flooding risk: CNN, Bloomberg $, Thomson Reuters Foundation, National Mortgage News; FEMA: E&E $; Climate Signals background: Flooding)
Climate Change Causing Mental Health Crisis: Climate change, and the lack of aggressive action to limit the heating of the planet, is causing mental health crises in the U.S. and around the world, the Arizona Republic reports. Stress related to climate change affects close to half (47%) of Americans 18 to 34, and 57% of teenagers. The detrimental mental health impacts can be related to acute events, such as a hurricane, as well as what mental health professionals call “anticipatory grief” for the damaged world children will inherit. Research has linked climate change to increased rates of suicide and depression in Inuit communities in the Arctic, and widespread existential anxiety in Maldivian children. “We can learn a bit from the literature on environmental disasters, where we see there are clear linkages with PTSD and other traumatic responses,” Sabrina Helm, who grew up “mortally afraid of nuclear disasters” as a child in Cold War Germany, told The Republic. “I was convinced when I was 15 that I would probably not reach adulthood. It was constantly in the news. It was so threatening. It’s exactly what we see now with climate change.” (Arizona Republic)
