A Multi-Hazard Climate, Displacement and Socio-Vulnerability Score for New York City

Abstract

Understanding and quantifying the compounding effects of climate change, displacement and socio-vulnerability is crucial for the development and implementation of timely mitigation and adaptation policies. Here, we present a new Climate Displacement and Socio-Vulnerability (CDSV) score over NYC that accounts for several climate hazards (coastal and riverine flooding, heatwaves, hurricanes and winter weather), displacement and social vulnerability metrics with the ultimate goal of identifying those areas where risk of the combination of the three factors is the highest (e.g., hotspots due to compounding effects). To our knowledge, this is the first time that multiple climate hazards have been studied in conjunction with displacement and socio-vulnerability for NYC. We discuss those areas that are exposed to high CDSV values for the different hazards, where multiple hazards show overlapping high values of CDSV and analyze how socio-demographic characteristics have changed over the past two decades. We find that Black and Latin/Hispanic people are exposed to the compounding effects of multiple hazards, especially in areas located in the south Bronx, south Brooklyn and Queens, with maximum CDSV scores reaching values close to ~80 over a scale of 100, and with the increased exposure of Black, Latinx/Hispanix and Asians since the beginning of the century. We find that, except for the case of coastal flooding, the percentage of White people living in areas characterized by CDSV values decreases as CDSV scores increase where the percentage of Black people and Latin/Hispanic people increases, with the latter showing the strongest correlation. We also find a statistically significant relationship between the number of people with asthma and diabetes and the CDSV score in the case of heatwaves.