Wildfires and climate justice: future wildfire events predicted to disproportionally impact socioeconomically vulnerable communities in North Carolina

Abstract

Wildfire events are becoming increasingly common across many areas of the United States, including North Carolina (NC). Wildfires can cause immediate damage to properties, and wildfire smoke conditions can harm the overall health of exposed communities. It is critical to identify communities at increased risk of wildfire events, particularly in areas with that have sociodemographic disparities and low socioeconomic status (SES) that may exacerbate incurred impacts of wildfire events. This study set out to: (1) characterize the distribution of wildfire risk across NC; (2) implement integrative cluster analyses to identify regions that contain communities with increased vulnerability to the impacts of wildfire events due to sociodemographic characteristics; (3) provide summary-level statistics of populations with highest wildfire risk, highlighting SES and housing cost factors; and (4) disseminate wildfire risk information via our online web application, ENVIROSCAN. Wildfire hazard potential (WHP) indices were organized at the census tract-level, and distributions were analyzed for spatial autocorrelation via global and local Moran's tests. Sociodemographic characteristics were analyzed via k-means analysis to identify clusters with distinct SES patterns to characterize regions of similar sociodemographic/socioeconomic disparities. These SES groupings were overlayed with housing and wildfire risk profiles to establish patterns of risk across NC. Resulting geospatial analyses identified areas largely in Southeastern NC with high risk of wildfires that were significantly correlated with neighboring regions with high WHP, highlighting adjacent regions of high risk for future wildfire events. Cluster-based analysis of SES factors resulted in three groups of regions categorized through distinct SES profiling; two of these clusters (Clusters 2 and 3) contained indicators of high SES vulnerability. Cluster 2 contained a higher percentage of younger (<5 years), non-white, Hispanic and/or Latino residents; while Cluster 3 had the highest mean WHP and was characterized by a higher percentage of non-white residents, poverty, and less than a high school education. Counties of particular SES and WHP-combined vulnerability include those with majority non-white residents, tribal communities, and below poverty level households largely located in Southeastern NC. WHP values per census tract were dispersed to the public via the ENVIROSCAN application, alongside other environmentally-relevant data.

Keywords: climate change; cluster analysis; environmental justice; housing cost; social vulnerability; wildfire.