Grace Tee Lewis on Louisiana's climate vulnerability - NOLA.com

Grace Tee Lewis on Louisiana's climate vulnerability | Environment | nola.com

Grace Tee Lewis is a senior health scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. She helped develop the Climate Vulnerability Index, an environmental justice tool created by the EDF and Texas A&M that ranks Louisiana parishes among the most vulnerable.

The goal of the CVI is to help community-based organizations, decision-makers and government agencies realize the goal of the federal Justice 40 initiative. This initiative aims to direct benefits to the most underserved, marginalized communities that have long lacked investment to make them more resilient in the face of a changing climate.

The Times-Picayune | The Advocate spoke to Tee Lewis about the index in this conversation that has been edited for length and clarity.

How did work on the Climate Vulnerability Index get started?

We have this project called data to action here in Houston. It started after Hurricane Harvey, because we saw that the communities that were impacted the worst were those same communities that have been suffering long-standing environmental justice concerns and health disparities. Those communities are often the first, the worst and the most frequently impacted. We noticed how it was very useful to provide data and scientific support for those communities to develop environmental justice community action plans. So, we decided to work on a national tool having a larger scope, as well as being able to include the intersection between climate, environment and health.

When you say climate vulnerable, what do you mean?

We took a very broad and holistic understanding of what makes a community strong and resilient. Or the corollary, what makes it vulnerable? From the very beginning, we partnered with community-based organizations and their leaders in defining what factors they would want to include in the tool to help them for their advocacy, but also to reflect what they felt were issues of vulnerability in their community.

There are 184 data points referenced in the tool. Where's that data coming from? And how did you select them?

We primarily used publicly available datasets to make it accessible. Some came from academic publications, from different reports like the IPCC. We leveled the playing field so everybody is talking using the same metrics to communicate with each other. Some of our datasets are projections, and so they're related to a middle-of-the-road climate scenario for a 2050 timetable.

There are two main groups of vulnerability indicators, the community baseline and the climate impacts. What’s the difference between them?

Community baseline factors are those that would contribute to a community being resilient. It's an understanding that baseline environmental conditions, health conditions, social and economic conditions, as well as infrastructure contribute to the overall ability of a community to be resilient and able to deal with issues that impact their community: if a community is already struggling to meet their energy cost or rental needs, if their house gets flooded it might be more difficult to have the resources to respond to that event. With regard to the climate change impacts, those are the direct and indirect impacts on health, socio-economics, as well as extreme weather events. We have things in there like the cost of climate disasters and projections of different extreme weather events.

Many parishes in Louisiana are the most vulnerable. Does that make the state the most vulnerable?

In the top 100 census tracts in the US, 87% of them came from just four states, but Louisiana in particular is pretty high on that list. In the top 50 counties and parishes in the US., the top-ranking parish is St. John the Baptist, followed by Iberville, Tangipahoa, St. Landry, Acadia, Calcasieu, Evangeline. This is just the top 15. New Orleans was in the top 7%.

Can you speak to what factors in the index show that those parishes are so vulnerable?

Orleans Parish ranks ninth out of 64 counties in Louisiana, but ranks in the top 2% nationally. Things that rise to the top are mental health and deaths of despair, pollution sources, maternal and child health among the community baseline ones. In climate impacts, flooding leads that, followed closely by the cost of climate disasters and disaster-related deaths. We could keep going but this kind of gives you the perspective. So, I think there's a lot of opportunity to try to address some of these concerns.