About
Climate change is a global and gradual process, but its impacts manifest locally in the form of community-level extreme heat, drought, flood, and other natural disaster events. Energy-based heating and cooling services are some of the most critical components of adaptation to these extreme weather events, as it enables households to insulate themselves from adverse weather events. But increased energy consumption results in costly energy bills which potentially pose a financial burden to low-income households. As the state of California seeks to develop equity-centered climate policy under the 2022 Scoping Plan for Achieving Carbon Neutrality, policymakers need local-level information about the burden of energy-based adaptation costs to form evidence-based investments and regulatory responses that prioritize the most vulnerable.This project quantifies the changing energy burden from climate-driven impacts across California communities and examines how these costs fall unequally across demographic, racial, and economic groups.
The project is a part of our continued collaboration with the California Air Resources Board (CARB) in developing a Climate Vulnerability Metric (CVM), which quantifies the community-level impacts of climate change across California at the census tract level for four key categories of climate damages: mortality, energy, labor supply, and flooding.