USA: Disasters forced 2.5 million to leave their homes in 2023 – 02/23/2024 – Environment

An estimated 2.5 million people will be forced from their homes in the United States due to climate-related disasters in 2023, according to new data from the Census Bureau.

The numbers, released this Thursday (22), paint a more complete picture than ever of the lives of these people in the aftermath of the disasters. More than a third said they faced food shortages for at least the first month after displacement.

More than half reported interacting with someone who appeared to be trying to commit fraud. And more than a third said they had been displaced for more than a month.

The US recorded 28 disasters last year, each costing at least US$1 billion (about R$4.98 billion). But the number of Americans displaced by these disasters has been difficult to estimate due to the country’s fragmented response system.

Understanding the human impact of disasters, not just the financial costs, is increasingly urgent as climate change fuels extreme weather, experts say.

“Many lives are disrupted by these events, in small and large ways,” said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit group focused on promoting social mobility and equity. “This has a very large cumulative cost that is difficult to capture. This [o novo número]at least, gives us a snapshot.”

The displacement data was collected in the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey to measure how emerging social and economic challenges are affecting Americans. The survey now includes questions about disasters in December 2022.

The first results, released in January 2023, showed that around 3.3 million people were displaced in the previous year. According to the latest batch of responses, collected in January and early February, 2.5 million said they had been displaced at some point in the past year.

The change from one year to the next is most likely a normal fluctuation, experts said, and may also reflect some limitations of the research.

Different versions of the survey are sent periodically via text message and email to more than 1 million households at a time. The survey is self-declaratory and takes about 20 minutes. The number of people responding can range from around 40,000 to 80,000. The Census Bureau then assigns weights to the responses to make them representative of the general population.

The Census Bureau notes that “sample sizes can be small and standard errors can be large.” But experts say the results still provide some of the best displacement figures available.

“It’s a number to take with a grain of salt,” said Rumbach, who has a doctorate in urban and regional planning. “But at the same time, it’s a dataset in a world where we don’t have a lot of good datasets.”

Hurricanes remain the most commonly cited cause of displacement, followed by floods and fires. In Florida, Texas, California and Louisiana, hundreds of thousands of people fled their homes.

Counting those displaced by disasters can be misleading because response agencies and nonprofit groups only know how many people they serve, which leaves out displaced people who do not ask for help and communities that receive no help at all.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, for example, only responds to events that receive a federal emergency declaration.

“This is just a small part of the overall disasters,” Rumbach said. As an example, he pointed to floods that destroy some homes and other so-called “low-attention disasters” that often affect more rural communities. “There is no incentive for people to add up all these [casos].”

But the Pulso research tries to do that, Rumbach said, although some researchers are wary of drawing too broad conclusions.

“The concepts themselves — what is a disaster? What is displacement? — are really left to the interpretation of the person responding to the survey,” said Elizabeth Fussell, a professor of population studies at Brown University.

The research lists fires among the “natural disasters” that could lead to displacement, for example, and some experts point out that it is not difficult to assume that someone selected this field of research after a house fire.

Fussell also noted that while previous federal surveys counted those who had permanently moved from their homes after a disaster, “displacement” in the Pulse survey could refer to a one-day departure.

While survey participants may choose to say they “never returned” to their homes, experts warned that the short-term nature of the survey could make it difficult to understand the true number of people permanently displaced.

The data also shows that people facing the worst outcomes from disasters tend to be from communities with less political power and subject to discrimination. Black and Latino people tend to be displaced more often, and poorer people tend to be displaced for longer, experts said.

This is amplified for people in these groups who also identify as LGBTQ, according to analysis.

“There are many federal agencies that are very aware that climate change is happening and that it will manifest itself as climate-related disasters,” Fussell said. “You need to understand their magnitude.”