Climate-related disaster risk in Australia: are risks higher for disadvantaged households?

As climate change generates more damaging weather-related events more often, the question of who bears intensifying disaster risk becomes increasingly pertinent. Drawing on disaster sociology, the environmental justice literature and quantitative studies of disaster impacts in real-estate markets, this paper contributes to research efforts to explore distributional questions of climate risk. We examine an actual flood event in an area of Australia that is increasingly recognised as vulnerable to rising flood risk. Our analysis combines geospatial analysis of flooding in residential areas, household-level socioeconomic data and data on house prices to identify socioeconomic patterns in the impacts of a flooding disaster that indicate broader patterns in flood risk exposure and resilience with implications for longer term dynamics of climate-related inequality. Our results show not only that risk exposure was greatest amongst the most disadvantaged communities but also that the most disadvantaged incurred substantially greater losses in comparison to equally flooded locations in wealthier areas, indicating exacerbated balance sheet losses on the part of disadvantaged households who are pushed into acute financial distress as a result of the floods. Variation in both risk exposure and impacts reflect that the costs borne as a result of climate-related disasters play out distinctly amongst different socioeconomic groups. Our analysis of key data sources undertaken at a high level of granularity contributes to much needed empirical research on the socioeconomic distribution of unfolding climate-related risks outside of heavily studied US locations.