Abstract
Climate change exacerbates the severity of natural disasters, which disproportionately affect vulnerable populations. Mitigating disasters' health consequences is critical to promoting health equity, but few studies have isolated the short- and long-term effects of disasters on vulnerable groups. We filled this gap by conducting a fifteen-year (2003-2018) prospective study of low-income, predominantly Black parents who experienced Hurricane Katrina: the Resilience in Survivors of Katrina (RISK) Project. Here we describe this project and synthesize lessons from work that has resulted from it. Our findings can guide policy makers, service providers, and health officials in disaster planning and response. We synthesize them into an organizational schema of five priorities: Primary efforts should be aimed at preventing exposure to trauma through investments in climate resilience and by eliminating impediments to evacuation, health care policies should promote uninterrupted and expanded access to care, social services should integrate and strive to reduce the administrative burden on survivors, programs should aid survivors in forging or strengthening connections to their communities, and policy makers should fund targeted long-term services for highly affected survivors.
Highlights
Climate change exacerbates the severity of natural disasters, which disproportionately affect vulnerable populations
Mitigating disasters’ health consequences is critical to promoting health equity, but few studies have isolated the short- and long-term effects of disasters on vulnerable groups. We filled this gap by conducting a fifteen-year (2003– 2018) prospective study of low-income, predominantly Black parents who experienced Hurricane Katrina: the Resilience in Survivors of Katrina (RISK) Project
Natural disasters harm human health and well-being, and the size of the population exposed to disasters is increasing as climate change intensifies extreme weather events, damages protective ecosystems, and causes sea level rise that leads to coastal flooding.[1]
Summary
Sample The RISK Project leverages prospectively collected predisaster data and a twelve-year follow-up period to uniquely examine how disasters affect health and how postdisaster conditions mitigate or exacerbate risks. The original study enrolled seventy-seven men (8 percent of the sample), the RISK Project has recontacted only women since 2010. The response rate for each postdisaster wave is extremely high for disaster research on a vulnerable demographic group (>70 percent). The case of Hurricane Katrina is unique among natural disasters, as it affected an urban area with high levels of concentrated, racialized poverty. Some RISK Project studies, and those focusing on physical health, have been limited by the health markers we collected before the research became the RISK Project, given the importance of baseline measurements to the estimation of independent consequences
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