Climate Change Will Hit Racial Minorities Harder, Analysis Finds

Racial minorities in the United States will bear a disproportionate burden of the negative health and environmental impacts from a warming planet, the Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday, including more deaths from extreme heat and property loss from flooding in the wake of sea-level rise.

The new analysis, which comes four days after Hurricane Ida destroyed homes of low-income and Black residents in Louisiana and Mississippi, examined the effects of the global temperature rising 2 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels. It found that American Indians and Alaska Natives are 48% more likely than other groups to live in areas that will be inundated by flooding from sea-level rise under that scenario, Latinos are 43% more likely to live in communities that will lose work hours because of intense heat, and Black people will suffer significantly higher mortality rates. The world has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution began and is on track to warm by more than 1.5 degrees by the early 2030s. Joe Goffman, acting head of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, said the comprehensive review was a “first of its kind.” It amounts to a federal acknowledgment of the broad and disproportionate effect that global warming is having on some of America’s most socially vulnerable groups. Just this week, the Department of Health and Human Services established the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity, the first federal program aimed at specifically examining how the burning of fossil fuels and other greenhouse gas emissions affect human health.