The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in August 2022 represents a historic investment by Congress to address the ongoing impacts of climate change. These resources are necessary to meet the Biden Administration’s goal of cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. The new law also provides a tremendous opportunity for underserved communities to further environmental equity and climate justice.
The increasing frequency of environmental hazards and natural disasters caused by climate change has a disproportionate impact on the health, income, and housing stability of underserved populations and communities. For instance, roughly 25 percent of naturalhazard mortality is due to heat exposure, and throughout the U.S., neighborhoods that include a greater proportion of low-income people and people of color experience significantly higher extreme surface heat. Poor air quality is another prevalent public health challenge. In nearly all regions of the country, children in lower-income households are most likely to live in areas with the highest projected increases in childhood asthma diagnoses due to climatedriven changes. Lack of affordable health insurance exacerbates these problems, as 60 percent of the uninsured are people of color and 58 percent are below 200 percent of the poverty level.
Despite facing disproportionately high climate-related risk, people of color and those on low incomes are less likely to have the financial resources to protect against and recover from climate-related loss, leaving them particularly susceptible. In addition, these employees experience more challenges resulting from reduced pay from lost labor hours caused by the impacts of climate change. On average, census tracts subject to higher climate impacts are projected to experience increases of up to 49 lost labor hours per worker with 2°C of global warming, and up to 84 lost labor hours per worker with 4°C of global warming for individuals who work outdoors, or indoors without air conditioning.
Climate impacts will also have a disproportionate impact on tenants in our nation’s affordable housing properties, many of which are located in coastal zones at risk of floods due to discriminatory land use decisions.
We cannot fulfill our nation’s climate goals without strong alignment with federal policies and programs that support investments in all facets of our work. LISC has released a comprehensive set of climate-resilience policy priorities and proposals that we intend to promote with members of Congress and the Administration in the coming months and years. We highlight below a subset of the proposals that we believe can be particularly powerful in combatting climate change impacts on underserved people and communities.
Download the entire overview of our policy lens on Disaster Recovery and Climate Resilience.