1. Introduction
At the summit organized by the New York Panel on Climate Change (NYPCC)
in March 2019, during the Q&A, a woman stood from the audience and told
to a panel made of predominantly city officers, that she was using the
online Flood Hazard Mapper to identify an area in Manhattan where she
and her husband could move to from Princeton. She was interested in
understanding whether buying a property located within a 100-year
floodplain was a good decision and, if so, she asked authorities to add
information about where the location of evacuation zones in the Flood
Hazard Mapper, so she could be sure that in a flooding event, the
evacuation centers were within reach. Whether or not this was a real
question or a provocation, I immediately made a connection with the
slowly growing literature linking coastal flood risk and environmental
justice, specifically the debates around living in a floodplain by
choice, which the woman was an example of, or because of historical
planning decisions that placed some homes and people in areas more at
risk than others.
The issue of social justice in relation climate change induced flooding
is not new and research on the topic has been growing in many directions
where justice dilemmas emerge. In this paper I briefly review the long
history of Environmental Justice (EJ) movement in the US, including
its meanings, scope and relationship to nature with the aim of
contextualizing how, more recently, the movement expanded to concerns
related to climate change. Then, I review how questions of
distributional and procedural justice are used in EJ literature as well
as climate change, specifically in relationship to coastal flooding. I
tease out the concepts of procedural justice that can complement a
distributional justice understanding of coastal flooding and I apply
those in the context of East Harlem, in Northwestern Manhattan, a
community district where issues of climate change and gentrification act
like a double edge sword towards it’s already burdened share of
low-income black and brown communities.
1. 1 The Evolving Environmental Justice Movement in the
United
States
Since the environmental reforms of the 1970s, according to Faber and McCarthy (2001), the environmental justice movement in the U.S. has not been effective because
it has been dominated by single issue approaches, affecting the quality
of environmental laws that were approved (for instance privileging
control of pollution rather than prevention). The authors attribute this
crisis largely to, on the one hand, environmental organizations of the
time being composed of white, middle-class professionals who were unable
to draw linkages between racism, abuse and economic inequality. On the
other, in an effort to draft legislation and make environmentally
friendly initiatives, the movement had become increasingly detached to
those it was supposed to serve. The movement was not oriented towards
public participation but established corporate-like organizational
models that inhibited citizen involvement. From the mid-eighties,
however, a subaltern movement grew emphasizing the need to re-establish
a connection with constituents who were predominantly black and brown
communities of color victim of toxic pollution in cities, connecting
them across a variety of issues and allowing for their own voices to
emerge. According to Faber and McCarthy, key moments in the
subaltern movement were the African American protests against PCBs in
North Carolina in 1982, building on other protests such as the Love
Canal Homeowners Association in 1978 who were able to successfully
relocate 900 families away from the toxic dump on which their homes
were built in Niagara (NY).
From the late-nineties, following the First National People of Color
Environmental Leadership Summit of 1991, we see the emergence of
regional and national campaigning networks striving to create stronger
institutional linkages between the local groups that emerged in earlier
years. By the late nineties local groups began to connect environmental
issues of exposure to and impacts of pollutants, to broader issues (e.g.
gun violence, occupational health and safety, immigration rights, human
rights, anti-globalization, indigenous rights to land and community
empowerment), moving from single-issue reforms to addressing the
systemic causes of injustice by bringing together a diverse group of
impacted communities (Faber and McCarthy, 2001). A landmark moment was
when in 1994 when the networks pressured the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) to issue the Executive Order 12898 titled “Federal Action
to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income
Populations” prohibiting discriminatory practices in federal programs
and the creation of the National Environmental Justice Advisory
Committee (NEJAC) to provide independent advice to the EPA and integrate
EJ within its programs (Bullard, 2001).
The crisis of the U.S. environmental movement in the 70s and the
emergence of a counter movement in the 1980-1990 is underscored by a
fundamentally different ontology of the environment between these two
periods. For Di Chirico (1995) the meaning of the environment for the
historically white, predominately male, and middle-class movement,
imbued with Euro-American colonist thinking, was largely associated with
the preservation of an uncontaminated wilderness, outside of society and
human culture. On the contrary, the definition of environment by EJ
activists relates to where one works, plays and lives. This definition
fits the urban dimension of EJ activism, where the victims of industrial
pollution reside, but it also accounts for the presence of people which
was taken for granted in previous understandings. Since many prominent
EJ activists see themselves emerging from the social movements of the
sixties, it makes sense to see activists as civil society rights
activists pursuing forms of grassroots political organization.
The EJ movement is fundamentally urban and it became quickly embedded
into struggles over gentrification and affordable housing as American
cities were growing increasingly unequal. A 2015 survey of Registered
Environmental Justice Organization (REJOs) revealed that organizations
have become more diverse in mission and focus, including land use
planning, climate and food justice, energy poverty into their
priorities, and calling for intersectional approaches between geography,
sociology, medicine and health. They are also seeking further
connections between environmental health, reproductive health and
environmental exposure and linking these with concerns of economic
policy (Larsen et al. , 2015).
In summary today’s EJ movement in the U.S. may be seen as the result of
the organizing of local black and brown communities of color fighting
for dignified living conditions in the presence of legacies of
environmental racism, at first, linking race to the location of
commercial hazard facilities and health outcomes. From the late nineties
onwards, as the national presence of localized networks pressured
national agencies to prohibit discriminatory actions on the basis of
race, the movement expanded their agenda, advocacy and on the ground
action to other issues, such as climate change. For decades the
environmental justice literature has studied the connection between
race/ethnicity and proximity to toxic facilities in cities, and the
work is now being leveraged to understand how justice and flood risk
combine in coastal areas.
1.2 From Traditional Flood Risk Assessments to a Flood Justice
Framing
As people across a variety of cities experience the increasing effects
of climate change, researchers’ interests in understanding the
multi-dimensional nature of coastal areas - simultaneously attractive,
biophysically dynamic, while subject to political decision making - has
increased. In comparison to research from other environmental hazards,
the literature regarding EJ implications of flood hazards is smaller and
more recent. A whole issue of Regional Environmental Change was recently
dedicated to research that takes inspiration from findings within the EJ
literature, extending the field to find applicability to Flood Risk
Management (FRM) (Thaler et al. , 2018).
The research collected in the volume borrows notions of distributive and
procedural justice and applies it to urban flood risk in both the U.S
and European cities. Although notions of sensitivity and vulnerability
have gained growing consideration in traditional FRM (Cutter et
al. , 2009), as well as the notion that vulnerability to flooding may be
only one of the issues among many others faced by low-income communities
(Lopez-Marrero and Tschakert, 2011), assessments are often only able to
convey an abstract snapshot with significant assumptions and
uncertainties about risks and possible mitigation measures, simplified
into variables easily measurable through cost-benefit analysis (Bos and
Zwaneveld, 2017). Flood risk assessments and maps are frequently updated
by authorities, as they incorporate new knowledge from modeling, however
these alternations tend to take place closed doors and in largely opaque
manner so that what was previously considered ‘safe’ under one model,
now becomes ‘at risk’ with little opportunity for discussion with those
who will be affected by this change (O’Hare and White, 2018).
An example of both the opaqueness of maps and models is the ongoing
debate between the City of New York, FEMA’s flood zones and their
ongoing update. In PLANYC, Bloomberg’s 2007 vision for New York,
authorities recognized that FEMA’s flood maps were severely outdated
(the last revisions were carried out in 1983) and warned “in areas
where insurers feel the risk is too great, or their ability to raise
premiums is hampered by political or regulatory limitations, the risk
burden will be shifted to the public as well as to banks and investors”
(p.139). The stakes are so high that when in 2015, the federal
government issued a preliminary draft of its updated 100-year flood
maps, which greatly expanded New York City’s flood zones, the city
rejected the maps. An additional 35,000 buildings, for a total of 72,000
buildings and 400,000 New York City residents were now in the 100-year
floodplain, according to the update, which meant thousands of additional
residents now had to purchase flood insurance (The New York Times,
2013). The city appealed by saying that as a result of technical errors,
FEMA overestimated the size of the floodplain, with a resulting huge
cost burden for homeowners and more so for low-income renters in public
housing units built on the waterfront. FEMA agreed there were errors and
that the maps should be revised, but for some planners, the fact that
FEMA maps are often subject to such dispute is a cause for concern.
Citizens are left in a limbo. Even though new maps allow property owners
to check their address to determine whether they are in a flood zone,
and how severe the flooding could be, there are considerable
uncertainties around whether a home falling into a floodplain map will
actually be affected by the next big storm.
The distributive dimensions of injustice, like costs and benefits of
measures to adapt to flooding through insurance, are influenced by
broader, often intangible, process-based inequities. Vulnerability
research shows that people living in poverty and/or socially
marginalized have reduced capacity for self-protection in terms of
mitigating flood hazards at home pre-event, evacuating in response to
flooding, or returning home or to employment in the aftermath of a
flooding event, accessing social protection such as flood insurance,
hazard mitigation infrastructure, emergency response information and
assistance (Green, Bates and Smyth, 2007; Collins, Grineski and
Chakraborty, 2018). The distribution of emergency response may also be
unequal. Based on physical damage calculations after superstorm Sandy,
populations living in some NYCHA towers suffered disproportionately from
delays in emergency response, living with no running water, heat or lack
of repair work until long after the storm (Sellers, 2017).
In conclusion flood risk researchers realized that the abstract and
aggregate information of FRM need richer accounts provided by a justice
framing in order “to capture fine-grained differences between affected
populations, particularly those that are rooted in more complex societal
disadvantage stemming from outside the flood risk arena” (O’Hare and
White, 2018:385).