Two new studies – a survey of residents in hurricane-battered Florida and Texas and a survey of people in wildfire-scarred California – reveal that negative personal experiences are among key variables in pushing people to take or accept protective measures like flood insurance and planned power shut offs. The wildfire survey, published in Energy Research & Social Science, is among the first analyses of people’s views of climate adaptation policies enacted by companies rather than governments. The hurricane survey, published in Environmental Research Letters, includes populations, such as elderly and poor people, that are often overlooked in such research. Both papers’ findings could inform public communications and policy to help vulnerable communities protect themselves from these and other extreme events.
“As catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes and other events increase in frequency, they are having severe emotional, social and economic consequences on people’s lives,” said Gabrielle Wong-Parodi, an assistant professor of Earth system science at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth), lead author of the hurricane study and sole author of the wildfire study. “It is imperative that we design ways to mitigate those impacts with an eye toward empowering vulnerable communities.”
The 2018 Camp Fire, California’s most destructive and deadly wildfire in recorded history, was sparked by power lines belonging to Pacific Power & Gas (PG&E). Every fire season since, PG&E and Southern California Edison, the dominant utilities in northern and southern California, have instituted temporary public safety power shutoffs to ensure their wires don’t contribute to conflagrations during times of particularly high wind and heat. These shutoffs affect millions.
While they may reduce the risk of wildfires, public safety power shutoffs may also impact health and normal daily activities by making it impossible to use certain home medical equipment, store food safely, attend school or perform work. In a previous pilot study, Wong-Parodi, found that such shutoffs – and, in some cases, even just the threat of shutoffs – were associated with poorer physical and mental health, especially among those living in households with medical concerns, children under 5, adults over the age of 65 and people with extremely low-income.
Read more at: Stanford University