Addressing Social Inequities for Temperature Extremes across Austin.

Austin’s extreme weather events have had disproportionate effects on its communities. Specifically, 2023’s heatwave and 2021’s Winter Storm Uri have unequally affected disadvantaged communities in Austin. In regards to 2023’s heat wave, there is a knowledge gap surrounding the urban heat island effect due to the lack of resources and education. To address this gap, a heat mapping handbook was created to expose disadvantaged communities to the urban heat island effect and help them visualize that effect by explaining the process of mapping heat. In the future, community feedback is essential to determining the success of the project because the handbook’s purpose is to be a tool for communities. In regards to 2021’s Winter Storm Uri, the inequities involve which communities experienced power blackouts during the storm. A study by Zeal Shah revealed that minority communities were disproportionately affected by the blackouts, but the reasoning behind this is still unknown. One theory is that critical infrastructure location had an effect on this. This is a broad assertion, but one foundational step is examining community accessibility to critical infrastructure. To do this, OSMnx, a python package, calculated the shortest distance between census block groups and hospitals, police stations, and fire stations. This resulted in minority communities having less accessibility to critical infrastructure because they were further from the critical infrastructure. There are social implications rather than concrete solutions that can be gathered from this result including that when future storms occur, minority communities will be disproportionately affected once again due to their distance from critical infrastructure locations. In the future, it is important to corroborate the methodology and results, incorporate water as a critical infrastructure to understand how communities’ water accessibility was affected by the storm, and finally to disseminate the results to social scientists and stakeholders to discuss how to combat these inequities. All in all, these projects together prove that there is value in empirical solutions to social problems.