Seeking the Principles of Power and Danger

A new report by the Victorian Council of Social Services has come out looking at spatial injustice around exposure to the 2022 Victorian floods and its ripple effects on affected communities. Here is the report: Ripple Effects: Spatial injustice and the 2022 Victorian floods . I am happy to have contributed to the quantitative analysis that underpins the report. Here is an article I wrote with Ang Li talking about some of the findings and their implications.

New paper out in Communications Earth & Envrionment  with Ang Li and Rebecca Bentley that looks at climate change and energy hardship. Here is the abstract:  Climate change is shifting the experience of energy hardship. Here we examine the effect of the intensity, frequency, and duration of temperature extremes on energy hardship, and how this risk is shaped by individual, housing and neighbourhood resiliencies across Australia, using nationally representative data (269,500 observations) on energy hardship linked to temperature records between 2005 and 2021. Findings suggest that the risk of energy hardship increases with more intense extreme heat and cold, with greater risks for older individuals, lone-person or single-parent households, and rental tenants. These vulnerabilities can be offset by quality housing and renewable energy installations. Energy hardship risks under moderate and high emissions global warming scenarios are projected to increase by 0.1%−2.6% and 0....

  Very happy to see this new scoping review published in The Lancet Plenatary Health . The recent IPCC assessment report argued that lack of ability to identify social vulnerability at a local and urban level was a critical barrier to climate adaptation planning. We conducted a scoping review of 230 studies that examined social vulnerability to the health effects of climate change in order to understand the main foci of the literature and potential gaps. We found that the main share of the research focused on high-income settings – the United States, Western Europe, Australia, Japan etc. China was the exception to that rule being the most researched country after the United States. The most vulnerable countries are lest studied. This is an issue for climate justice. We found that most research focuses on a narrow set of socio-demographic variables. Age, sex, ethnicity, education, income being amongst the most used indicators of social vulnerability. We found a relative paucity...