A new analysis from the Urban Institute shows that rural communities of color are overrepresented in FEMA’s Community Disaster Resilience Zones, which are areas classified as at-risk of natural disasters.
The National Risk Index shows which communities are most at-risk for natural hazards, including flooding, heat and drought, and severe storms. FEMA used the data from the index to identify the most at-risk and in-need communities to designate them as Community Disaster Resilience Zones, or CDRZs. According to FEMA, the initial 483 zones designated in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., will be prioritized for federal support, including increased funding for resilience and mitigation projects.
“We found that the most rural communities in the United States that have been designated a Community Disaster Resilience Zones … there’s an over representation of people of color living in those communities,” Anne Junod, an environmental social scientist in the climate and communities program at the Urban Institute, told the Daily Yonder. “What that means is, by FEMA zone designation, the most at risk, and the most in need, among the communities that they selected, they’re disproportionately rural and they’re disproportionately home to people of color.”
The researchers used the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural-Urban Continuum to categorize CDRZ tracts on a three-part scale from most rural to most metropolitan. They found that about one in six—79 of 483 CDRZs—are classified as remote rural, meaning they are farthest away from metropolitan centers and have the smallest populations. In general, rural people are overrepresented among CDRZs compared with the national rural population, according to the 2020 Census. This means they are at disproportionate risk to climate disasters based on FEMA’s National Risk Index data. Nationwide, people in rural areas (defined as nonmetropolitan) are 14% of the population, but make up 35% of the population of all CDRZs, the report said.
Further, when comparing demographic characteristics, CDRZs in remote rural areas are home to more people of color than rural communities nationwide. Among the 79 remote rural CDRZs, nearly two-thirds—61%—have higher shares of people of color than rural areas nationwide, with the share of people of color in remote rural CDRZs ranging from 24.1% to 89.2%
“I would characterize it as we know that rural communities have unique climate threats,” Junod said. “They’re uniquely vulnerable to disaster, many different types of disasters, for different reasons.”
Junod said it’s not necessarily a negative that there is an overrepresentation of rural and rural communities of color, because the goal of the FEMA program is to provide federal, public and private resources to the most at-risk and in-need communities.
However, she added, researchers who study rural communities find that those communities don’t have the same dense network of private sector and philanthropic support to tap into that communities in larger cities do.
Junod said FEMA, USDA and other federal agencies can think of ways to streamline the process for rural communities applying for federal dollars to support mitigation projects.
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