We’re all breathing smoke, but climate change hits some people harder than others

I thought I was prepared. I grew up in a house filled with smoke, after all

It was not uncommon for my mom, toiling over a hot skillet of Hamburger Helper, to reach down with a long, menthol cigarette in her mouth and light it on one of the open burners.

So that smoke in the air? I figured it was no big deal.

I was wrong. About halfway into my regular walk with the dog Monday night, my chest tightened and my head started to pound. Before long, I felt like I might throw up and called the whole thing off.

If this is what our future holds — summer skies turned from blue to thick, apocalyptic brown — it’s going to be a miserable challenge for all of us. There’s no question about it.

Still, as a new collaborative report produced in part by the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group highlights, the impacts of climate change will be most acutely and painfully felt by some of our state’s most vulnerable populations.

This includes low-income communities, communities of color and indigenous people.

It’s cause for concern, and impetus for a new way of thinking, researchers behind the report suggest.

As the report details, factors like where you live, where you work and your access to health care and other services greatly influence your ability to cope with the impacts with man-made climate change. The report was informed by an exhaustive academic review of existing research and by convening nearly a dozen community conversations across the state.

Take, for instance, agricultural workers — many of whom are people of color. Temperatures are expected to rise in this region by as much as10 degrees by century’s end. Exposure to this hazard poses a very real threat.

Sure, middle class white guys in cubicles like myself will endure the same increase, but the impact clearly will be different.

Or take coastal communities comprised largely of indigenous people. Rising sea levels will be something we all will face, but the threat of rising seas will be drastically different for those who live along the coast or rivers.

Sure, some of that seems obvious. However, according to Heidi Roop, a researcher with the UW’s Climate Impacts Group who contributed to the new report, one key problem is that it’s rarely taken into consideration when crafting policy and climate change preparedness plans.

This brings me back to the smoke that surrounds us.

While Roop acknowledges that we’re all being forced to breathe it, the extent to which it impacts us potentially hinges on our home, our work, the language we speak and our socioeconomic status.

“What matters is insuring that we have facilities and access to health care and to things, like cooling centers or places where people can go where there is air that’s being filtered,” Roop say

She added that it’s imperative that we make sure that people are aware of the resources that are available and “have accesses to facilities that can help them cope during these times of stress.”

“Are those (resources) distributed in an equitable fashion?” Roop said. “That’s one of the question that we need to work on as a state and as emergency managers.”

In many ways, the report, which was a partnership between the UW Climate Impacts Group and Front and Centered — which describes itself as “a climate justice coalition of more than 60 community-based groups across Washington” — was as much about demonstrating what we know as what we don’t know.

That was part of the point, according to Deric Gruen, a program director at Front and Centered, even while Roop candidly admits that “how much more we still need to learn” surprised her.

“We haven’t been asking a lot of questions about who’s impacted,” Gruen says of climate-change research as a whole and elements of it particular to this state. “It’s understanding the vulnerability piece.

“When exposed, if you have heatstroke, it’s about if you have access to a hospital or if you have documentation that allows you to use public services. Those all impact our ability to respond.”

Again, Gruen used wildfire as an example. Specifically, he pointed to farm workers in Eastern Washington last year forced to evacuate at the last moment because many weren’t informed of the threat in a language they understood.

In the study, researchers describe this particular vulnerability as “linguistic isolation.”

“So that’s part of the problem we’re pointing out,” Gruen says of the new report. “We need to be asking the right questions in order to respond appropriately.”

According to Gruen and Roop, that’s the ultimate goal of this study.

There is no blanket approach for responding to climate change, they argue. Rather, if we’re going to get this right, they say, it will be by responding appropriately to individual risks and vulnerabilities and making sure all communities are represented in the process.

“People need to be empowered to understand how climate change will impact their lives, and then be part of the conversation about how we move forward,” Roops says.

Or, as Gruen succinctly puts it:

“We can no longer develop climate or any environmental policies without understanding the equity implications.”