Quantifying the Effects of Social Vulnerability on Weather Outcomes

The socio-economic attributes of communities, such as income, education, language, and infrastructure, are often posited to influence the outcomes individuals face as a result of weather and climate-related hazards. Within the United States, some case studies from specific weather events provide evidence of disproportionate impacts of weather to socially vulnerable communities, however, there has been limited effort to comprehensively quantify how the impacts of weather are distributed across society. There are two primary challenges. First, there is no widely accepted definition of “vulnerability” and the data for measuring vulnerability are limited. Second, the societal consequences of weather are not systematically measured and recorded

This study marks an initial attempt to address this issue using the variables that underlie the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) from the Center for Disease Control, along with data from NOAA's Storm Events Database. We conducted this analysis based on a county-level panel spanning the years 2009 to 2022 to estimate the marginal effects of SVI variables on property damage and mortality resulting from ten distinct types of weather hazards. We find evidence of systematic reporting bias and attenuation bias, but are able to identify lower limits for hazard-specific marginal effects of different classes of social attributes on property damage and mortality. Our findings provide robust statistical evidence that social factors indeed impact these outcomes in the context of weather events. The nature and extent of these effects differ significantly across various hazard types and social factors. Our results suggest that the additional damages experienced by communities recognized as socially vulnerable exceed the damages faced by comparable communities without such vulnerabilities by at least hundreds of millions of dollars annually.