Socio-economic change and the realisation of climate risk

Climate change risk is unequally distributed across Australia. That risk, however, is increasingly realised as weather-related disasters occur more often and with greater intensity in certain locations. Parts of NSW and Queensland, for example, have been hit by multiple major disasters in recent years.

This context poses a risk of social upheaval, where households with more resources resettle in safer locations, leaving households with less resources concentrated in higher-risk locations. Research in the US confirms these trends.

While there is some evidence indicating similar social upheaval in Australia, there is little systematic empirical research on this phenomenon in Australia to date.

Establishing the degree and reason for the concentration of low socio-economic households in at-risk locations occurs is of urgent value to policymakers to prepare for the intensification of climate risk in hotspot locations.

This project seeks to fill an important gap in the literature by examining socio-economic change in locations that are increasingly recognised as climatically vulnerable. The project also seeks to contribute to a better understanding of how households' perceptions of climate change are changing as well as how households respond to the realisation of climate risk.

We will collaborate with MDAP to map data from multiple flooding disasters in New South Wales (a state identified as particularly vulnerable to climate change) in terms of the statistical areas available in census data. This allows the analysis to compare socioeconomic change in disaster-hit locations with those locations observed as less vulnerable, using multiple waves of census data.

A key project aim is to compare key socio-economic indicators before and after a disaster event – including movements of households into and out of disaster-hit locations – by comparing geo-mapped census indicators from 2016 and 2022.