文章基本信息

标题：Rising Seas, Rising Inequity? Communities at Risk in the San Francisco Bay Area and Implications for Adaptation Policy
本地全文：下载
作者：I. Avery Bick ; Adrian F. Santiago Tate ; Katherine A. Serafin 等
期刊名称：Earth's Future
电子版ISSN：2328-4277
出版年度：2021
卷号：9
期号：7
页码：n/a-n/a
DOI：10.1029/2020EF001963
语种：English
出版社：John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
摘要：Increasing coastal flooding threatens urban centers worldwide. Projections of physical damages to structures and their contents can characterize the monetary scale of risk, but they lack relevant socioeconomic context. The impact of coastal flooding on communities hinges not only on the cost, but on the ability of households to pay for the damages. Here, we repurpose probabilistic risk assessment to analyze the monetary and social risk associated with coastal flooding in the San Francisco Bay Area for 2020–2060. We show that future coastal flooding could financially ruin a substantial number of households by burdening them with flood damage costs that exceed discretionary household income. We quantify these impacts at the census block group scale by computing the percentage of households without discretionary income, before and after coastal flooding costs. We find that for several coastal communities in San Mateo County more than 50% of households will be facing financial instability, highlighting the need for immediate policy interventions that target existing, socially produced risk rather than waiting for potentially elusive certainty in sea level rise projections. We emphasize that the percentage of financially unstable households is particularly high in racially diverse and historically disadvantaged communities, highlighting the connection between financial instability and inequity. While our estimates are specific to the San Francisco Bay Area, our granular, household‐level perspective is transferable to other urban centers and can help identify the specific challenges that different communities face and inform appropriate adaptation interventions.