Anticipating Climate-Related Changes to Residential Energy Burden in the United States: Advance Planning for Equity and Resilience

Abstract

Access to high-quality infrastructure such as housing and energy supply can enhance access to opportunities and protection from harm, including through resilience to climate and weather hazards. Climate change poses new and dynamic challenges for infrastructural adequacy, compounding challenges of existing long-term underinvestment. In the United States, historical infrastructural choices such as redlining have substantially contributed to the structural marginalization and intergenerational wealth disparities experienced today by Black, Latinx, and other groups. This marginalization manifests in part as social vulnerability to disproportionate infrastructural and other hazards, which, without active intervention, is likely to continue to increase as climate change progresses. Adaptation to climate change will require a massive mobilization of resources for new and enhanced infrastructures. Future infrastructural investments must not repeat or mirror the unjust patterns of the past, nor facilitate their continuation through patterns such as reactive investments made based on financial value. In this commentary, we argue that the effects of climate change on future equity and resilience are particularly salient in the context of existing disparities in residential energy burden, specifically related to the way that future energy and housing system choices could worsen these disparities without explicit effort. We describe the intersection of two major anticipated climate-driven changes: (1) climate migration, which is expected to disrupt communities and change patterns of housing and energy needs; and (2) energy burden, which is expected to be exacerbated both by climate change itself (e.g., through higher temperatures) and by interactions among mitigation strategies (e.g., electrification in colder climates receiving low wealth climate migrants). Anticipating climate migration and shifting residential energy needs could facilitate a more just energy transition, focused on avoiding locking in extreme energy burdens and protecting people from extreme temperature events. Preemptive planning and targeted infrastructural investments can enable just transitions and community resilience.