As devastating fires tear through Los Angeles and homes are destroyed, thousands of people—including Hollywood stars—have had to evacuate.
Extreme desert winds combined with drought, amplified by climate change, have fuelled the catastrophe. Former Fire and Rescue NSW Commissioner, Greg Mullins, says that climate change also reduces the window for hazard-reduction burning, as dangerous conditions are emerging far earlier than usual.
Climate change does not discriminate. However, its impacts do.
From the ability to evacuate through to how quickly people can return home and move on with their lives, the combined factors of age, gender, health status, financial resources and social networks all play a role.
If you are a Hollywood A-lister with multiple homes, or a person who can afford to rent a place while your own is rebuilt, then the upheaval of displacement will be felt differently from someone who was already struggling financially.
If you can work remotely, can afford childcare, have your own transport, don’t have a chronic health condition and have friends or family for support, then your ability to bounce back will be significantly different from someone without these things.
Disasters affect individuals and groups in different ways, ‘including by exacerbating existing gender and social inequalities associated with unequal access to resources and decision-making processes, and higher exposure to environmental shocks and stressors’.
The emergency nature of evacuations means that authorities’ initial focus is on immediate assistance. This makes sense as a disaster is unfolding, but it may mean that longer-term needs are overlooked, potentially leaving people without shelter, livelihoods or support networks. Historical and systemic factors that have resulted in present inequalities also leave people differently situated in terms of their ability to avoid prolonged displacement.
Responses to disasters can exacerbate existing inequality and oppressive societal structures. As one scholar has observed, recovery processes tend to be ‘driven by powerful economic and political interests that reinforce pre-existing power inequalities and endemic patterns of marginalisation’, yet are presented as purely objective and technical. They often reflect and further entrench existing patterns of discrimination, which limit people’s access to assistance.
What we often see in the aftermath of disasters is people returning by necessity, living in a shell of a home or in a tent in their front yard because they can’t afford to go elsewhere. This may be compounded by the need to work, or to care for family members who may not be able to travel far. In many cases, these are people who already face intergenerational disadvantage, discrimination and marginalisation. While they have returned home, they have not found a dignified or durable solution.
Governments have special obligations under international law towards women, children, Indigenous peoples and people with a disability, and these need to be understood in an intersectional way and implemented holistically. For instance, if age, gender or disability are perceived only as individual characteristics that may heighten risk, rather than embedded within broader social systems, then responses may be simplistic and ill-attuned.
In my conversations with officials involved in evacuations and recovery, there is a clear recognition that what comes after the evacuation often poses the biggest challenges. Yet, only three per cent of disaster funding is spent on preparation compared to 97 per cent on recovery.
This is a particular problem in the Global North, where the common framing of disasters as ‘exceptional’ can preclude ‘the recognition of displacement as a real and serious consequence of disasters thereby under-prioritising investment into pro-active measures and reforms to address existing patterns of vulnerabilities and strengthen resilience in the long-run’.
That is why evacuation planning must consider the longer-term physical, social, economic, cultural and psychological aspects of recovery, including through coordination across multiple sectors and government departments. It also requires focused attention on systemic, intersectional risks, and the fact that ‘vulnerability’ is created and perpetuated by social structures and systems.
If this is ignored, then an evacuation can become the disaster.
This week, California’s Governor Gavin Newsom said that ‘there’s no fire season’ anymore. ‘It’s fire year. It’s year-round.’ That’s all the more reason why we need structural reforms to ensure that everyone who is affected stands an equitable chance of recovery.