Charlotte forecast: Climate change inequity hits harder

TROY HULL | THE CHARLOTTE POST

Established research shows urban neighborhoods with fewer trees and other foliage are more at risk of climate-related incidents, including excessive head and cold. In Charlotte, that means lower-income communities, which are primarily in the east, west and north.

Climate change discriminates.

The rate of global warming per decade since 1982 is 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit. There are many factors that cause climate change, and in Charlotte, there is a glaring correlation between environment and social inequality. Depending on where you live, exposure to pollution and extreme weather results in different outcomes.

“It really takes someone seeing severe impacts, oftentimes, to change their thinking on something,” said UNC Charlotte professor Michael Ewers PhD, a human geographer and social scientist. … “And maybe here, until things get really bad, maybe people just continue to pretend there's nothing wrong.”

For example, there is less tree canopy in the east and west, said Allison Rhodes, executive director of the nonprofit Trees Charlotte. Without canopy, those areas heat more quickly in the summer and cool in the winter.

“One of the initiatives we currently have is our Tree Zilliance initiative,” Rhodes said,” where we work in under-canopied and underserved communities. This is year three of that initiative. Currently, we are working in the McCrory Heights neighborhood, the Greenville neighborhood and the Ramblewood neighborhood. Two of those neighborhoods are in the crescent. Then the other is closer to the Nations Ford area. We go into these neighborhoods because they are considered under-canopied. The canopies there are anywhere from 39-42%.”

Fewer trees lead to less absorption of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas, and with more of it in the atmosphere, areas without a canopy suffer.

Rhodes said Trees Charlotte’s goal is a canopy of at least 50%. In older neighborhoods, the focus is on planting new trees as well as care for older ones. Often, people will cut down a large healthy tree for fear of it falling on their home.

“It was really shocking to hear some of [Trees Charlotte’s] statistics on just the neighborhood differentials in percentage of tree canopy,” said Tina Shull PhD, a UNC Charlotte professor and historian of race, immigration and climate migration. “But then when you hear stories of individuals and family histories, you understand that, for example, maintaining trees in your yard is very expensive. There is a cost burden there. I had heard stories of families opting to cut trees down that are living, because they can't afford it if a tree falls during a storm. It can be thousands of dollars to maintain it, or to clean that up, and it becomes this liability. So, programs that could help support tree maintenance are very important.”

Fewer trees are but one aspect of environmental change on the underserved. There’s a disproportionate impact on vulnerable communities – like in Charlotte’s crescent of low-income and disproportionately Black neighborhoods – that don’t have the money or flexibility to mitigate human-made hazards such as greenhouse gases caused by vehicle exhausts.

In 2023, The Post reported on a study by researchers at Princeton University that found “people of color are found to be particularly more vulnerable to heatwaves, extreme weather events, environmental degradation, and subsequent labor market dislocations.”

Extreme heat – commonplace in the South during summer months – takes a greater toll on Black people than other ethnic groups. According to the Killer Heat Report authored by the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, the average number of days with a heat index above 105 degrees Fahrenheit is higher in counties where Black people make up at least 25% of the population – nearly twice the national average – compared to those that are not. The same scenario applies to extreme cold.

As a result, counties like Mecklenburg, which is 33% Black, are exposed to as many as three additional days of extreme temperatures annually than those where Black people make up smaller percentages.

Researchers expect about 20 more extreme heat days per year by mid-century for so-called urban heat islands, or UHIs, which occur “because cities are much warmer than surrounding rural areas – cities resemble an ‘island’ of heat among a broader ‘sea’ of cooler temperatures," UCS senior climate justice and health scientist Adrienne Hollis Ph.D wrote in a 2019 blog.

Trees Charlotte emphasizes the value of plants and the role they play in the ecosystem.

“We cannot [lobby for legislation],” Rhodes said, “so we do word of mouth. However, the city does have a goal, and they have a canopy care program. We partner. We get funding from the city and from Mecklenburg County to help increase the canopy care and the city, and we also get funding from Arbor Day Foundation to help plant.”

Shull and Ewers are part of a research project called Climate Inequality CLT that  Shull says found correlation between climate change, geography and racism.

“I started collaborating with Michael and other professors at UNC Charlotte who are also interested in this topic, and we learned that our teachers and students are often very directly affected by not just climate change but environmental racism and histories of environmental justice,” said Shull, who curated a traveling exhibit on climate inequity. “Many of them are African American, long-term residents in Charlotte or newly arriving immigrants from all over the world that had stories about climate change impacting them.”

Ewers said research affirms the social cost of climate change.

“I think the biggest surprise overall, or maybe it's not a surprise, are all of the patterns of these kinds of things that we have on our website,” he said. “We have several different indicators – health, environment, industrial things – they all map onto the existing crescent and wedge formation. We’re talking about environmental things. Why wouldn’t it be more spread out? But … it really maps onto the same industrial pollution, proximity to highways. It really maps on to the exact same patterns.”

Herbert L. White of The Post contributed to this report.

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