Today the U.S. government released the fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5), the latest government and scientist-led look into our climate reality.
The report is one of the main tasks of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), set in motion by climate change research mandates of the 1990 Global Change Research Act. The White House describes the most recent version – and the accompanying interactive website, podcast, brand new mapping tool, and first-of-its-kind online art exhibit — as the authoritative and definitive assessment on how the country is doing to address climate change.
In stark contrast to the Trump administration’s quiet rollout of the fourth National Climate Assessment in 2018, the Biden administration is inviting the world to see just how far the country’s come, and the very long road it has ahead. The report is a deep, information-rich survey of the status of climate science, the warming world’s human impact, and the systems and tools at use to address the country’s role in facilitating and addressing climate change. It’s also an outline for the types of mass investments needed to build a sustainable future.
It’s an onslaught of information that reiterates long standing scientific claims, like the inevitable degradation of marine ecosystems, rising sea levels, and the fact that while the U.S. has successfully reduced a lot of its CO2 emissions, it’s still responsible for a large chunk of Earth’s warming — with a “Net Zero emissions” reality far away.
But the report also provides information that hasn’t been the main focus of similar U.S. climate reporting in the past, including expert thoughts on racial and environmental justice, Indigenous climate solutions, and climate change’s mental health effects.
“While there are still uncertainties about how the planet will react to rapid warming and catastrophic future scenarios that cannot be ruled out,” the report reads, “the future is largely in human hands.”
2022 set a record for extreme weather events affecting Americans
Building on previous National Climate Assessments, the new report found that extreme events — like drought, heatwaves, hurricanes, and wildfires — continue to increase in severity, extent, and frequency, facilitated (according to growing evidence) by human-caused climate change.
It also documents the country’s most extreme weather year yet, with 2022 setting the record in both number and cost of weather-related disasters over the last four decades.
In 2022 alone, the report explains, the United States experienced 18 weather and climate disasters with damages exceeding $1 billion.
To put that into perspective, the country experienced only three similar-scaled disaster events per year on average during the 1980s. Since 2018, there has been one every three weeks or less, totalling 89 billion-dollar events.
Credit: Boston Children’s Hospital, NOAA NCEI, and CISESS NC
Black communities will bear the brunt of flooding disasters
As these extreme events increase, they will impact certain communities more than others. “Neighborhoods that are home to racial minorities and low-income people have the highest inland (riverine) flood exposures in the South, and Black communities nationwide are expected to bear a disproportionate share of future flood damages — both coastal and inland,” the report states.
This flood risk is due in part to exclusionary housing practices that also affect those communities’ ability to adapt to other climate concerns. Neighborhoods that lack urban green infrastructure (or “environmental amenities”) are 12°F hotter on average during a heatwave than wealthier neighborhoods, for example.
Credit: NIEHS/Kelly Government Solutions and USGS/ASRC Federal Data Solutions; FG Trade/E+ via Getty Images; YinYang/E+ via Getty Images; Marc Dufresne/iStock via Getty Images
Addressing climate change is a pressing health issue
While the most visible consequences of a warming climate include the physical destruction of devastating weather events, other climate change repercussions — including those brought on by increased warm periods and worsening air quality — affect humans more insidiously.
“Health risks from a changing climate include higher rates of heat-related morbidity and mortality; increases in the geographic range of some infectious diseases; greater exposure to poor air quality; increases in some adverse pregnancy outcomes; higher rates of pulmonary, neurological, and cardiovascular diseases; and worsening mental health,” the report asserts. “These risks affect all US residents but have disproportionate repercussions for under-resourced and overburdened communities and individuals, such as pregnant people, communities of color, children, people with disabilities, people experiencing homelessness, people with chronic diseases, and older adults.”
Warming climates lead to worsened water and air quality, limited food access, and deaths from persistent drought, as well as changes in the “distribution, abundance, and seasonality” of vector-borne diseases like Lyme, dengue, and West Nile. It also impacts the transmission and severity of zoonotic diseases (those originating in animals) like COVID-19, the report explains.
Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory, CDC, Columbia University, University of Arizona, and University of Colorado
Even further, the displacement of communities due to climate-related changes leads to mental and spiritual harm, the report contends. “These harms may arise from forced displacement and migration, trauma, loss of sense of place and belonging, and disruption of livelihoods, lifeways, and social support systems,” the authors note.
“Mental health conditions including anxiety, depression, and suicide have become more prevalent in the US in the past decade, especially among adolescents. Climate change may increase these mental health burdens.”
Indigenous self-determination is linked to climate change
In agreement with climate activists and community organizers, the report states that climate change solutions should involve the voices and cultural practices of the country’s (and continent’s) Indigenous communities. “Many Indigenous persons are scientists of the environment, holding holistic understandings of the interconnected drivers of climate change and evidence of climate-related changes and strategies for adaptation. For generations, Indigenous Peoples have centered their knowledge of climate change in their cultures, political organizations, and arts.”
But the report puts it even more directly: Indigenous-led climate solutions and community resilience can only be achieved alongside continued investment in their self-determination. This manifests in a community’s right to facilitate a transition to renewable energy; taking over the resource management practices of lands, waters, and other resources currently under federal or state oversight; or even accessing culturally relevant climate science data.
“Today, Indigenous initiatives addressing climate and energy are often organized as movements for protecting and advancing Indigenous rights,” the report states. “These include rights to self-determination regarding climate change responses in their territories — rights that are critical to Indigenous efforts to choose the best pathways for supporting health, economic vitality, educational institutions, environmental quality, governance, cultural continuance, and spiritual traditions.”
Climate justice is possible
The fifth National Climate Assessment portrays the continued evolution of our understanding of climate change and the advancement of climate science, including how slow-to-move government and industry responses have exacerbated environmental, economic, and social inequities. It also points out how seemingly positive policies to address displacement and migration, the rise of urban green infrastructure, and the transition to more sustainable energy can have a disproportionate negative impact on low income and communities of color.
“Fossil fuel-based energy systems have resulted in disproportionate public health burdens on communities of color and/or low-income communities. These same communities are also disproportionately harmed by climate change impacts. Social systems define who is seen as deserving of local, state, and federal interventions to address climate impacts,” the report asserts. “Even when all citizens are treated the same under the law, differential outcomes may result if the law ignores structural inequalities.”
Counter to growing political and environmental nihilism, however, the report’s authors conclude that climate justice — a human rights approach to climate solutions that focuses on historic and current inequity to create equal access to jobs, environmental goods, and quality of life — is still very much possible, with a focus on inclusive climate mitigation strategies and a focus on “just transitions” to a green economy.
“Through complex interactions, conscious and unconscious tendencies and biases, and visible and invisible social rules, social systems distribute climate risks and benefits; they also create the opportunities for climate adaptations and climate mitigation to be envisioned and acted upon.”
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