HOUSTON, Aug. 25 (Xinhua) -- Without climate change, 30-50 percent of residences, or up to 50,000 homes, in Texas' Harris County would not have been flooded by catastrophic Hurricane Harvey in 2017, according to a new study published Thursday.
Furthermore, low-income Latinos, the largest racial group in the county, which encompasses Houston, were hit disproportionately harder in the climate change-attributed flooding, the study issued by the journal Nature Communications found.
The Category 4 hurricane made landfall in southern states of Texas and Louisiana in August 2017 and stalled for more than four days, killing 68 people in Texas, 36 of them in Harris County. It may have ruined up to 1 million vehicles along the Texas Gulf Coast and in the Houston area alone, roughly one in seven cars may have been destroyed, according to a report by local newspaper Houston Chronicle.
The hurricane caused roughly 125 billion U.S. dollars in damage, more than every natural disaster in U.S. history except Hurricane Katrina 17 years ago. Parts of the metropolitan area still have not fully recovered five years after its landfall.
"We already know that climate change is increasing the severity and frequency of extreme weather events," said the study's lead author Kevin Smiley, an assistant sociology professor at Louisiana State University (LSU).
"But now researchers are able to pinpoint the extent of damage from a specific extreme weather event such as Hurricane Harvey and the resulting floods," he was quoted as saying by a report from the ScienceDaily website based on materials provided by LSU.
The rainfall total was 15-38 percent greater than it would have been in a world that was not warming, the researchers found, citing estimates from two researches published in 2017 and several models they created to reflect a variety of precipitation scenarios.
Even in the most conservative scenario, in which only 7 percent of the precipitation is associated with climate change, the researchers still found that nearly 13 percent of the affected buildings would not have been flooded at all in a non-warming world.
They also found that Latino households had accounted for 36 percent of residences that had not flooded at all but for 48 percent of those that had flooded because of climate change. White households accounted for 37 percent of the dry homes and 33 percent of those that had flooded due to climate change.
In general, neighborhoods with higher incomes had experienced greater effects of climate-boosted flooding, but this pattern was reversed for communities with more Latino residents, where greater effects from flooding were observed in lower-income neighborhoods, the study found.
"This means that we have quantified the contribution of climate change to the suffering of people who live there," said Michael Wehner, the study's co-author and senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The study is "a first of its kind investigation into potential disparities between those impacted by the climate change-induced flooding, finds patterns of racial and economic disparities", said the ScienceDaily report.
Climate change attribution, which ascertains the connection between climate change and extreme weather events, involves running computational models to estimate how much these changes in climate make extreme weather events, like hurricanes, more severe. ■