Hurricanes: Climate and Socioeconomic Impacts

Hurricane Climate Studies

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They found the declines caused a small — but not significant — increase in major hurricanes during the season. The RCPs Representative Concentration Pathways are scenarios of future concentrations of greenhouse gases and other forcings. To look into the future, the researchers introduced expected changes in temperature from present day until into their predictive tool. The results show that, by , major hurricanes in the Atlantic could become 1.

The findings suggest that failing to take action on climate change could lead to more frequent and more costly hurricanes in the coming decades, Murakami says:. Thus, continued anthropogenic forcing has the potential to further amplify the risk of major hurricanes in the North Atlantic, with corresponding socio-economic implications.

However, they talk about SSTs but not ocean heat content.

Introduction

They missed the boat. In May, Trenberth and colleagues published a paper which noted that, during the hurricane season, ocean heat content — a measure of the heat stored below the ocean surface — was the highest on record both globally and in the Gulf of Mexico. The article first appeared on Carbon Brief. The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum. Climate Change Global Risks How a warm Atlantic Ocean caused the record hurricane season Similar storms could become much more frequent.

The 10 best countries to be a woman Kate Whiting 18 Dec More on the agenda. Explore the latest strategic trends, research and analysis. The new research, however, looks at what could have caused the entire season to be so extreme.

How a warm Atlantic Ocean caused the record hurricane season

In modern times, fewer lifes have been lost due, in part, to the development of modern communication systems, and to improved understanding of the mechanisms of storm formation and movement. However, the immense growth of human populations in coastal areas, which are at risk to hurricanes, has resulted in very large increases in the amount of property damage sustained in the last decade in the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean regions.

This book is of interest to climatologists and meteorologists and as source of information for policymakers and emergency management planners. Atlantic and Gulf Coasts: Diaz and Roger S. Sheaffer and Christopher W. Climate Variations and Hurricane Activity: Rappaport and Jose J. Doyle and Garrett F. Vulnerability to Hurricanes Along the U. Pulwarty and William E. Watson and Jan C. Felts and David J. Hurricane Mitigation Efforts at the U. Notes "With 77 figures in 30 tables. HathiTrust Digital Library, Access Conditions Use copy. Digital Library Federation, December View online Borrow Buy Freely available Show 0 more links With access conditions SpringerLink at http: Set up My libraries How do I set up "My libraries"?

These 10 locations in All: Australian Emergency Management Library. May not be open to the public ; Open to the public We find a strong, statistically significant relationship between housing damage and return migration. The large difference in return rates between those whose homes were destroyed and those whose homes were uninhabitable most likely reflects the fact that many residents whose homes were uninhabitable had by that time received FEMA trailers, which allowed them to live at their former properties or in a nearby trailer park as they rebuilt their homes.

On the other hand, residents whose homes were completely destroyed were more likely to have lived in a thoroughly devastated area where rebuilding made little sense given the extent of damage to the neighborhood. For residents with damaged but habitable homes or undamaged homes, there was little to prevent them from returning. Measures of income and wealth are poorly reported or omitted in surveys such as this so we chose not to include these measures.

We opted instead to use education as a measure of socioeconomic status. We turn now to the results of the hazard model analysis of return migration. We present estimates from five different models in Table 4. All models include a basic specification of the baseline hazard, which collapsed adjacent periods that were substantively and statistically indistinguishable from each other.

However, the results are robust to changes in the specification of the baseline hazard function. The first two models in Table 4 include the effects of race and education alone along with the baseline hazard , whereas Model 3 includes both variables simultaneously. Model 4 adds all of the remaining demographic and socioeconomic covariates to Model 3, and Model 5 includes all of the covariates and, in particular, adds indicators of housing damage to Model 4.

The results in Table 4 show exponentiated parameter estimates or relative risks. Robust standard errors calculated using the jackknife method are shown in parentheses and statistically significant parameter estimates are indicated using asterisks. The model F -tests, shown at the bottom of Table 4 , indicate that all models provide a good fit to the data.

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These are very large effects, and reflect the dramatic differences in return rates shown in the descriptive analysis above. There are two interesting findings in Model 3, which includes the race and education variables simultaneously. First, the effect of education declines by about half and is no longer statistically significant. Second, the effect of race on return migration rates is reduced only modestly and the effect is statistically significant at the 0. Observed differences by education in return migration to New Orleans appear to be due in large part to underlying differences in education between blacks and non-blacks.

Model 4 investigates the effects on return migration of the other demographic and social variables, including age, sex, state of birth, marital status, employment status, and housing tenure. Age is the only statistically significant covariate in this group. The most important finding from Model 4 is that the effect of race remains unchanged and statistically significant at the 0. Thus, none of the covariates included in Model 4 appear to account for the higher rates of return migration to New Orleans among non-blacks compared to blacks during the first 14 months following Hurricane Katrina.

Model 5 includes a control for housing damage as well as all other covariates. Our descriptive results above showed that housing damage appeared to have a strong association with return migration. Results from this model indicate that housing damage has a major effect on return rates to New Orleans among residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina, even after controlling for all of the other covariates.

A joint-test of the three housing damage covariates indicates that these coefficients are statistically significant at the 0. The effect of the race covariate was statistically insignificant and substantively small in Model 5. Thus, after controlling for differences in housing damage there was essentially no difference in return rates between blacks and non-blacks displaced from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina.

Importantly, none of the other covariates in the model—except housing damage—appeared to account for the large observed disparity in return migration rates between blacks and non-blacks. Thus, the lower observed rates of return to New Orleans for blacks compared to non-blacks were accounted for in large part by blacks experiencing higher rates of severe housing damage than non-blacks. Our results suggest that housing damage was the major factor slowing the return of displaced New Orleans residents, particularly among black residents and those of low socioeconomic status.

This is consistent with previous studies that show that there were disparities in the effects of Hurricane Katrina by race and socioeconomic status at multiple stages of the disaster, including the process of returning to the city among displaced residents Groen and Polivka a ; Elliott and Pais ; Paxson and Rouse ; Vu et al. We believe that both historical processes and the uneven recovery of neighborhoods explain why black and less educated residents were more vulnerable to housing damage and delayed or failed to return to the city.

Patterns of land development and residential segregation that occurred in New Orleans and the rest of the country over the twentieth century concentrated black residents in the lower-lying sections of the city, which led directly to their experiencing high rates of housing damage when the levees broke and floodwaters settled in the lowest parts of the city. On the other hand, our analysis suggests that blacks who did not live in these lower sections were no less likely to return to New Orleans than others.

In our final multivariate model, the estimated differences in return rates between blacks and non-blacks were statistically insignificant and substantively small. In other words, the race of individuals was not the overriding factor in explaining why black residents were less likely to return during the first year after Hurricane Katrina.

Rather, blacks were less likely to return to New Orleans because they experienced higher rates of severe housing damage. This may, in turn, have been caused by residential patterns of blacks compared to non-blacks—that is, by blacks living in neighborhoods that were more likely to have been flooded as suggested by Logan —or by blacks living in dwellings that were more prone to flood damage—such as having a slab foundation rather than a raised foundation. Flooding and housing damage may be associated with several other factors that were not measured directly for our analysis.

For example, there was a direct relationship between flood damage and the date on which neighborhoods were reopened for residents to return. Neighborhoods were opened by zip code beginning on September 29, , and initially included the unflooded neighborhoods of Algiers, the Central Business District, the French Quarter, and Uptown City of New Orleans Flooded neighborhoods reopened much later. Reopening of the Lower Ninth Ward, the most devastated areas of the city where the majority of the homeowners were black, was only completed in May of City of New Orleans This process suggests that residents of the more-damaged areas of the city were displaced longer at least in part because their neighborhoods were slower to reopen.

This may have resulted in major destruction of physical infrastructure and social networks, making these neighborhoods far less attractive places to which to return. For instance, flooded neighborhoods were likely to have longer delays in the reopening of schools and health facilities, and the restoration of public services. The absence of returned neighbors also meant that many community institutions were not functioning well or at all and problems related to crime and safety might be more severe than in neighborhoods with more residents. Our analysis has several limitations due to its small sample size and the short observation period for return migration.

However, our main conclusion that the racial and socioeconomic differential in the rate of return migration occurred in large measure because of differences in housing damage is unlikely to be affected by these limitations. Despite its small sample size the pilot study was successful in drawing and interviewing a representative sample of pre-Katrina residents of New Orleans.

The comparison of respondent characteristics to corresponding data from the ACS suggests that the sample is not significantly biased in a way that would affect our results. Nevertheless the modest sample size precluded our ability to relax and test the assumption of proportional hazards in our piecewise hazards model.

In addition, our analysis is limited by the relatively basic set of covariates and covariate categories that we used. Finally, our analysis focuses on return migration over a relatively short period of 14 months following the hurricane. The return migration process is likely to have continued in the subsequent months and years. We speculate, based on the findings from our analysis, that continued return migration among non-blacks and the highly educated was unlikely to be substantial. In contrast, there was a higher likelihood of additional return migration among blacks and individuals of low socioeconomic status.

These residents may have been able to return as FEMA trailers became available, repairs to their homes were completed, or affordable rental housing became available. These developments were likely to have occurred slowly, although they have the important potential of reducing disparities in return rates by race and socioeconomic status.

This full-scale survey of displaced New Orleans residents is being fielded approximately 4 years after Hurricane Katrina and will provide a picture of return migration among a larger group of displaced residents over a substantially longer period. It also includes a richer set of measures to analyze the effects of factors such as housing reconstruction and neighborhood recovery on return migration.

By duplicating and expanding the analysis presented in this article with the new data, we will be better able to determine how race and socioeconomic disparities in return migration have shaped the repopulation of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and whether blacks and non-college educated pre-Katrina residents simply experienced a delay in return migration, or have in fact not returned at all. The repopulation of New Orleans has been difficult to observe and even harder to analyze.

Census form will not include the question asked in previous censuses regarding place of residence 5 years prior to the census date, which would have been about 5 months before Hurricane Katrina. DNORS will allow us to assess the extent to which later return migration by blacks and those with less than college education have brought the city closer to its pre-Katrina racial and socioeconomic composition. The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions of many colleagues in designing, implementing, and analyzing the Displaced New Orleans Residents Pilot Survey.

This is because housing damage could vary greatly by housing characteristics such as whether the dwelling had a raised rather than a slab foundation within areas with similar flood depths. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Author manuscript; available in PMC Jan 1. Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer. See other articles in PMC that cite the published article. Abstract Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans on the 29th of August and displaced virtually the entire population of the city. Conceptual framework and previous research Our conceptual approach for studying return migration among New Orleans residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina is based on multiple theories of migration as well as past research.

Measures Our analysis examines return migration to New Orleans among pre-Katrina residents of the city who were 18 years of age or older at the time of survey. Open in a separate window. Analysis methods Our analysis of return migration among New Orleans residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina, and disparities in return migration by race and socioeconomic status, proceeds in three steps. Results We describe the duration of displacement from New Orleans for the entire sample over the month period following Hurricane Katrina in Fig.

Variable Returned to New Orleans? Conclusions Our results suggest that housing damage was the major factor slowing the return of displaced New Orleans residents, particularly among black residents and those of low socioeconomic status. Acknowledgments The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions of many colleagues in designing, implementing, and analyzing the Displaced New Orleans Residents Pilot Survey.

Final dispositions of case codes and outcome rates for surveys. Barnshaw J, Trainor J. Race, class, and capital amidst the Hurricane Katrina diaspora. The sociology of Katrina: Perspectives on a modern catastrophe. Rowman and Littleufield; Berube A, Katz B. Confronting concentrated poverty across America.

Metropolitan Policy Program, Brookings Institution; The state of black America. National Urban League; Next steps on the road to recovery; pp. Rowman and Littlefield; City of New Orleans. Situation report for New Orleans, September 29, Retrieved November 13, , from http: Moral hazard, social catastrophe: The changing face of vulnerability along the Hurricane Coasts.

Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Sciences. Journal of Marriage and the Family. Elliott JR, Pais J. Race, class, and Hurricane Katrina: Social differences in human responses to disaster. Everything in its path: Destruction of community in the Buffalo Creek Flood. Simon and Schuster; Farley R, Frey WH. Changes in the segregation of Whites from Blacks during the s: Small steps toward a more integrated society. Constructing New Orleans, constructing race: A population history of New Orleans. Journal of American History.

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