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Climate change and population settlement patterns are altering the severity and spatial dimensions of flooding. Despite associational evidence linking flood exposure to population health in the United States, few studies have used counterfactual strategies to address confounding or examined how sociospatial determinations of risk, such as floodplain delineation, affect well-being. Using the case of Hurricane Harvey, I leverage novel, repeated cross-sectional health survey data from Houston immediately predisaster (N = 2,540) and six to nine months postdisaster (N = 2,798), linked to local flood inundation and floodplain data. Difference-in-differences models show that the probability of psychological distress and fair/poor health increased significantly in the flooded treatment group, with mixed evidence on unhealthy mental health days and no change in unhealthy physical health days. Triple-difference estimators further reveal buffered mental health adversity for those in flooded areas with high floodplain areal coverage relative to little or no floodplains. Descriptive analyses of mechanisms suggest that floodplain coverage did not differentiate individual-level disaster exposure but increased the likelihood of disaster preparedness and evacuation. This article offers insights into the climate–health nexus empirically by using a causal framework to improve credibility and conceptually by demonstrating how an underexamined dimension of vulnerability—sociospatial risk determinations—can stratify population health.

Person-Days Under Emergency Order. 2025.

with X Zhang

Population Research and Policy Review

This research brief introduces a novel quantity to estimate the population burden of environmental emergency orders: EOpd,j the person-days, pd, in geographic region, j, under an emergency order (EO). Using the case of evacuations, we pair spatial data on every mandatory evacuation for wildfires and floods in British Columbia from 2017 to 2023 with local data on population demographics from the 2016 Canadian census. Empirically, we describe the EOpd,j over years and by hazard at the provincial level, and then estimate community-level EOpd,j and bivariate correlations with sociodemographics across census subdivisions (municipalities and equivalents). During this period, the provincial-level EOpd,j was 2.71 million person-days under mandatory evacuation order. Evacuation mandates affected 34% of subdivisions, and among affected communities, the average EOpd,j was 12,085 person-days. We find that per-capita EOpd,j correlated positively with the share of Indigenous people, low-income residents, and adults with high-school-or-less education. Person-time measures of emergency orders provide insight into the population burden of environmental hazards across contexts, can easily be extended to other cases, such as air quality alerts or heat warnings, and may help demographers study direct environmental effects or effect moderation across places.

Stratifying Disaster. 2023.

Social Forces

Disaster aid is an increasingly costly form of social spending and an often-overlooked way that welfare states manage new forms of risk related to climate change. In this article, I argue that disaster aid programs engender racial and socioeconomic inequalities through a process of assistance access constituted by distinct state logics, administrative burdens, and bureaucratic actors. I test this claim empirically by analyzing 5.37 million applicant records from FEMA’s Individuals and Households Program (IHP) from 2005 to 2016. Results demonstrate that key institutional features—the conditions of eligibility and sufficiency, burdens of proof, and assessments by contracted inspectors—combine in a stepwise process to funnel permanent repair resources to homeowners in whiter communities, while temporary rental aid is granted disproportionately to households in communities of color. Analyses of denial codes suggest racial disparities in appraisals of disaster damage. Among those approved for aid, more benefits accrue to those from comparatively higher income communities, and a decoupling of permanent and temporary housing aid further stratifies socioeconomic growth during recovery. Theoretically, this research advances an account of institutional processes transferable to other analyses of social programs, and it introduces climate risk as a new form of social risk against which welfare states insure citizens.

Mitigating Health Disparities after Natural Disasters. 2020.

with MC Arcaya, SR Lowe, M Zacher, J Rhodes, & MC Waters

Health Affairs

Climate change exacerbates the severity of natural disasters, which disproportionately affect vulnerable populations. Mitigating disasters’ health consequences is critical to promoting health equity, but few studies have isolated the short- and long-term effects of disasters on vulnerable groups. We filled this gap by conducting a fifteen-year (2003–2018) prospective study of low-income, predominantly Black parents who experienced Hurricane Katrina: the Resilience in Survivors of Katrina (RISK) Project. Here we describe this project and synthesize lessons from work that has resulted from it. Our findings can guide policy makers, service providers, and health officials in disaster planning and response. We synthesize them into an organizational schema of five priorities: Primary efforts should be aimed at preventing exposure to trauma through investments in climate resilience and by eliminating impediments to evacuation, health care policies should promote uninterrupted and expanded access to care, social services should integrate and strive to reduce the administrative burden on survivors, programs should aid survivors in forging or strengthening connections to their communities, and policy makers should fund targeted long-term services for highly affected survivors.

Lessons from Hurricane Katrina for Predicting the Indirect Health Consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic. 2020.

with M Zacher & SR Lowe

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Beyond their immediate effects on mortality, disasters have widespread, indirect impacts on mental and physical well-being by exposing survivors to stress and potential trauma. Identifying the disaster-related stressors that predict health adversity will help officials prepare for the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Using data from a prospective study of young, low-income mothers who survived Hurricane Katrina, we find that bereavement, fearing for loved ones’ well-being, and lacking access to medical care and medications predict adverse mental and physical health 1 y postdisaster, and some effects persist 12 y later. Adjusting for preexisting health and socioeconomic conditions attenuates, but does not eliminate, these associations. The findings, while drawn from a demographically unique sample, suggest that, to mitigate the indirect effects of COVID-19, lapses in medical care and medication use must be minimized, and public health resources should be directed to those with preexisting medical conditions, their social networks, and the bereaved.
Natural hazards and disasters distress populations and inflict damage on the built environment, but existing studies yield mixed results regarding their lasting demographic implications. I leverage variation across three decades of block group exposure to an exogenous and acute natural hazard—severe tornadoes—to focus conceptually on social vulnerability and to empirically assess local net demographic change. Using matching techniques and a difference-in-difference estimator, I find that severe tornadoes result in no net change in local population size but lead to compositional changes, whereby affected neighborhoods become more white and socioeconomically advantaged. Moderation models show that the effects are exacerbated for wealthier communities and that a federal disaster declaration does not mitigate the effects. I interpret the empirical findings as evidence of a displacement process by which economically disadvantaged residents are forcibly mobile, and economically advantaged and white locals rebuild rather than relocate. To make sense of demographic change after natural hazards, I advance an unequal replacement of social vulnerability framework that considers hazard attributes, geographic scale, and impacted local context. I conclude that the natural environment is consequential for the socio-spatial organization of communities and that a disaster declaration has little impact on mitigating this driver of neighborhood inequality. 

The Social Consequences of Disasters. 2020.

with MC Arcaya & MC Waters

Annual Review of Sociology

We review the findings from the last decade of research on the effects of disasters, concentrating on three important themes: the differences between the recovery of places vs. people, the need to differentiate between short and long term recovery trajectories, and the changing role of government and how it has exacerbated inequality in recovery and engendered feedback loops that create greater vulnerability. We reflect the focus of the majority of sociological studies on disasters by concentrating our review on studies in the United States, but we also include studies on disasters throughout the world if they contribute to our empirical and theoretical understanding of disasters and their impacts. We end with a discussion of the inevitability of more severe disasters as climate change progresses and call on social scientists to develop new concepts and to use new methods to study these developments.