Our Changing Climate’s Social Challenges

Spring 2025
By Katharine Shilcutt

In late October, catastrophic flash floods killed more than 200 people overnight in Valencia, a major industrial region and port city in Spain. It was the worst natural disaster in the country’s history, the result of a destructive weather phenomenon called DANA (depresión aislada en niveles altos) that’s growing more frequent due to climate change.

Meanwhile, the death toll from Hurricane Helene surpassed 230 people across Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee and the Carolinas, making it the deadliest mainland U.S. hurricane since Katrina in 2005. Milton came hot on Helene’s heels, intensifying to a Category 5 twice due to an overheated Gulf of Mexico. And just three months earlier, Beryl killed 22 people in Houston — a rare July hurricane, and the earliest Category 5 Atlantic storm on record. Estimated damages from these events, along with Hurricane Francine on the Gulf Coast, now hover at $95 billion and counting.

Rice’s new Center for Coastal Futures and Adaptive Resilience launched in the midst of these storms, and its co-directors quickly found themselves in national news conversations in The New York Times, Newsweek, PBS and The Atlantic. The topic? What the future holds for coastal industrial areas and, crucially, what can be done to advance and support more equitable forms of adaptive resilience in such areas in the years ahead.

“We’re trying to help coastal cities adapt to climate change, specifically coastal industrial communities,” says Rice anthropologist Dominic Boyer, who co-directs CFAR alongside Rice sociologist Jim Elliott. “Our colleagues in the natural and engineering sciences here at Rice have been pioneering new tools and hard infrastructures; we need to innovate equally in the social sciences to meet our climate’s growing social challenge.”

 

 

Along coastal zones, a growing climate danger

What sets coastal industrial communities apart from other coastal areas is the fact that, as in Houston, they’re home to both people and industrial facilities housing chemicals and other pollutants, which are just as vulnerable to flooding and hurricane strikes as low-lying housing.

“What happens if you have millions of people living next door to already quite dangerous industrial facilities that are now increasingly vulnerable to climate change?” Boyer asked. “Miami, for instance, will face all sorts of pain as the sea level rises — it’s a much more dire situation long term for them — but they don’t have to worry about petrochemical facilities exploding, or storms releasing millions of gallons of toxic materials onto local lands and into local waterways.”

Coastal zones only occupy about 20% of the world’s land surface, but they are home to more than 40% of the global population. Currently, 2.15 billion people worldwide live in near-coastal zones and 898 million live in low-elevation coastal zones, and these numbers are only projected to increase.

 

What sets coastal industrial communities apart from other coastal areas is the fact that, as in Houston, they’re home to both people and industrial facilities housing chemicals and other pollutants, which are just as vulnerable to flooding and hurricane strikes as low-lying housing.

 

Yet coastal areas also carry disproportionate risks for those who call them home, including the constant threat of hurricanes, storm surges, erosion and flooding — whether due to sea-level rise or other natural disasters. All of this is now exacerbated by climate change, but the consequences are not borne evenly. 

Calculations by CFAR show that nearly 3,000 facilities registered with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for having large amounts of dangerous chemicals on-site were located in the direct cones of impact during hurricanes Helene and Milton. CFAR’s goal is to advance and support more equitable forms of adaptive resilience emerging from the twin challenges of climate change and social inequality. These efforts include developing new projects and partnerships to address the spread of hazardous chemicals into nearby communities, disproportionately home to lower-income residents and communities of color.

 

Centering the social challenges of climate mitigation

Creating these types of collaborations is crucial, says Elliott, and something that social scientists like himself and Boyer understand is truly vital for CFAR’s mission of improving the well-being of all groups and communities facing uncertain coastal futures.

“Our big thing is thinking about how to advance needed innovations from the social side,” Elliott says. “Effectively, we’re asking, ‘What if we put the social challenge of climate change in the center, and then reached out to architects, engineers and climate scientists, rather than the other way around? What might that do to help create and support more equitable tools for adaptive resilience?’”

One of the tools that’s already sparked attention nationwide is a map created by CFAR research scientist Phylicia Lee Brown that displays toxic industrial facilities at high risk for flooding. It spotlights the potentially devastating environmental and health impacts that rising flood risk can have on local communities by plotting every major polluter in the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory estimated to be at elevated flood risk.

 

 

One of the tools that’s already sparked attention nationwide is a map created by CFAR research scientist Phylicia Lee Brown that displays toxic industrial facilities at high risk for flooding. It spotlights the potentially devastating environmental and health impacts that rising flood risk can have on local communities.

 

“Here is where the federal government has identified facilities that handle large amounts of hazardous chemicals known to be harmful to human health, and here you can see that each one has a flood risk score, showing the likelihood of its site flooding over the next 20 years,” says Elliott, pointing to the interactive online map. “So people can search and say, ‘OK, where do I live and are there flood-prone polluters nearby that merit attention during — but ideally before — the next storm?’”

Results from the tool show, among all U.S. counties, that Harris County is No. 1 in the nation in terms of the number of such flood-prone facilities. It is also No. 1 in terms of the average flood risk score associated with each facility.

 

Teaming up to build solutions

Tools, of course, are one thing. Action is another. So CFAR is also teaming up to help imagine and advance solutions. Some of these partnerships include collaborating with natural scientists and engineers to pursue large-scale grants to promote and fund equitable, interdisciplinary interventions alongside those living and working in at-risk communities. Other efforts include partnering directly with local community organizations to develop initiatives from the ground up.

These efforts are becoming even more important as the climate itself becomes more unpredictable. The day we sat down to discuss the new CFAR map of large industrial facilities with elevated flood risks, a Houston thunderstorm blew in unexpectedly — as swift and sudden as the May derecho that barreled into Houston with winds up to 100 miles per hour, causing the release of nearly 2,500 pounds of pollutants when plants lost power in the storm. Relentless rains trapped us inside a cafe on campus, giving us even more time to contemplate the uncertain future ahead.

 

 

Storms like the one we waited out that day make Houston an ideal incubator for such discussions, research and action. So, too, do its massive population and petrochemical complex, much of it situated along Houston’s ship channel, the largest port by tonnage in the U.S.

“There are unique hazards here with the ship channel, where we have an enormous concentration of industrial facilities, hazardous materials and storage infrastructure vulnerable to our changing climate,” Elliott says. “Exposed to these colliding futures are the residents living nearby, who face not only the rising risk of storms but also the toxic tides those storms potentially carry, deposit and spread over larger and larger areas of Houston.” 

Boyer recalled a conference he’d attended not long ago in the Netherlands for the 150th anniversary of Rotterdam’s ship channel — the largest in Europe. 

“Rotterdam is more or less the Houston of the Netherlands, where all kinds of industrial, chemical and petrochemical activity is happening in close proximity to residential populations. The conference organizers brought together community members, politicians, designers, architects, artists, social scientists — really, everyone — to ask, ‘How should our nearby coastal industrial communities evolve to meet the challenges of our times?’” Boyer says. “What should the next 150 years look like?”

Having a public dialog like this has never really happened in the U.S., he says. And this, too, is what CFAR now exists to help advance. “In Houston especially, it seems like it would be a good time to have that conversation,” Boyer says. 

 

Dominic Boyer is professor of anthropology in Rice's School of Social Sciences. Jim Elliott is the David W. Leebron Professor of Sociology and chair of the Department of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences.