Age – Chasing Tales

The previous pieces in this series looked at how risk is priced, transferred, and hedged. This one looks at who absorbs it when none of those mechanisms work, and why that’s never random.

When devastating floods hit Kerala in 2018, a Dalit family walked three kilometres to the nearest relief centre at a temple, only to be told they were not allowed to enter.¹ A year later, when Cyclone Fani ravaged Odisha, another Dalit family walked to a relief shelter and was also turned away.¹ ²

Both were excluded by caste.

As activist Sangram Mallick put it: “Your caste determines what kind of treatment you will get during a disaster.”¹

These are often described as failures of disaster response. They are not. They are examples of how disaster response works.

Environmental stress (floods, heatwaves, droughts, cyclones, etc.) appears neutral, but its effects are not. Repeatedly, across countries and across hazards, harm clusters along pre-existing social lines: caste, race, gender, income, disability, age. The World Meteorological Organization puts it plainly:³ inequality and disaster vulnerability are “two sides of the same coin.” Climate change, in this sense, is not an external shock landing on a functioning system. It is a multiplier applied to a system that is already unequal.

To understand how that multiplication works, it helps to look at disasters not as singular events, but as a process, one that unfolds in three stages:

Who is exposed before the event.
Who is able to survive during it.
And who is able to recover after it.

I. Pre-Event: Who is placed in harm’s way
Across contexts, marginalised groups are systematically pushed into what are, in effect, sacrifice zones- places that are cheaper precisely because they are more dangerous.

In India, research published in the journal Demography found that marginalised caste groups experience 25–150% higher heat exposure at work than dominant caste groups, even after controlling for income, education, and geography, a pattern the authors described as “thermal injustice.”⁴ Separately, a 19-year study published in the journal Temperature found that India recorded nearly 20,000 heatstroke deaths between 2001 and 2019, a figure researchers say is an undercount given systemic underreporting.⁵

The same structural logic appears elsewhere. In the United States, racially segregated housing patterns have concentrated Black communities in urban heat islands with less tree cover and higher exposure to extreme temperatures.⁶ ⁷ Indigenous communities, displaced from ancestral land through colonial processes, are now disproportionately located in areas more exposed to climate hazards such as drought, wildfire, and extreme heat.⁸

Income reinforces this exposure. A global study of 573 flood events found that higher inequality within a country correlates with higher flood mortality, and that the protective effect of economic growth disappears once inequality is accounted for.⁹ So GDP growth appears protective in simple models but that effect vanishes when inequality is held constant: for the more than 80% of workers in low- and lower-middle-income countries employed in the informal sector, exposure is not just about where they live, but how they work.¹⁰ In Delhi, daily surveys of informal workers during peak summer showed that each 1°C increase in wet-bulb^{(Wet bulb temperature is the lowest temperature air can reach by evaporating water into it. It measures how effectively sweat evaporates to cool bodies, thus accounting for both heat and humidity. Unlike standard temperature, high wet bulb temperatures mean sweat cannot evaporate, making it difficult for the body to cool down, because high humidity means sweat cannot evaporate as easily.)}¹¹ temperature reduced earnings by 19%, with losses reaching 40% during heatwaves.¹² Medical expenses also rose 14% per degree, reaching 25% on heatwave days.¹² For them, heat is not a background condition, it is a direct constraint on survival.

II. During the Event: Who absorbs the shock
When a disaster hits, it does not affect everyone equally. It interacts with existing vulnerabilities, whether physiological, social, and/ or economic, and amplifies them.

For many women, the danger is not only environmental but social. A systematic review across 15 countries found that disasters increase violence against women through three pathways: economic entrapment, unsafe displacement environments, and shifts in household power dynamics.¹³ After Hurricane Katrina, intimate partner violence among displaced women in Mississippi nearly tripled within two years (went from 12.5% to 34.4%).¹³

Displacement itself often creates conditions where harm becomes easier. Camps without lighting, locks, or private sanitation are not just inadequate—they are enabling environments.¹³

For people with disabilities, the barriers are more immediate. In the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, persons with disabilities were twice as likely to die.¹⁴ Across disaster types globally, this ratio ranges from two to four times.¹⁵ The reasons are rarely mysterious: evacuation systems that assume mobility, communication systems that assume visibility or hearing, shelters that assume independence.¹⁵

Age compounds vulnerability in different ways. During the 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave (United States), a majority of those who died were over 65¹⁶: in Oregon alone, approximately two-thirds of the 107 confirmed heat deaths were over that age.¹⁷ Physiological factors, such as reduced thermoregulation, chronic illness, play a role, but so do structural ones: isolation, dependence on caregivers, limited access to timely information.

For informal workers, the choice during a disaster is often binary: stop working and lose income, or continue working and risk physical collapse. A salaried worker may retreat indoors. A day labourer cannot.¹²

The disaster, in other words, does not create vulnerability in the moment. It exposes how unevenly the capacity to withstand shock is distributed.

III. Post-Event: Who is able to recover
If the disaster itself reveals inequality, recovery is where it becomes entrenched.

A 2023 IMF working paper found that income inequality increases after severe disasters across both advanced and developing economies, particularly when shocks are repeated or coincide with downturns.¹⁸ Recovery is not a reset to equality, it is an underlining of pre-existing societal furrows.

This underlining, in the form of aid, often follows the logic of the market. Systems designed to restore property values tend to benefit those who already have property, while offering little to those who do not.¹⁹ The result is that those with assets recover faster and more fully, while those without fall further behind.

At this point it is important to ask what allowed the wealthy asset-owner to build their initial wealth? There are many who truly come from nothing- including no social status, but there are many who do benefit from at least their social background, such as a poor person who nevertheless benefits from a high caste status, or a person who has exactly the same background and qualifications as another, but benefits from their gender or sexual identity.

Migration is one of the clearest outcomes of this gap. Research has shown that marginalised caste groups in India are significantly more likely to be displaced by climate impacts, with many becoming vulnerable to trafficking and forced labour during that process.²⁰ Globally, climate change is expected to displace tens of millions by mid-century, with the most vulnerable populations facing the highest risks during movement and resettlement.²¹

Food security follows a similar pattern. Global assessments show that the majority of the world’s population already lives in countries below the average food security threshold, and warming scenarios are expected to push hundreds of millions more below it.²² Economic growth offers only limited protection, because it raises income (usually along socially-accepted lines⁹) without fundamentally strengthening resilience.²³

Recovery, then, is not simply about rebuilding what was lost. It determines who has the resources to face the next disaster—and who does not.

Isn’t disaster indiscriminate?
It is often said that disasters do not discriminate.

If that were true, their impacts would be randomly distributed.

They are not.

Across countries, across hazards, and across time, the same pattern repeats: those who are already marginalised face greater exposure, suffer greater harm, and recover more slowly. Even major risk models have historically failed to account for these differences, despite extensive evidence that social inequality drives disaster outcomes.²⁴

This consistency is the point. The pattern is not incidental, it is structural. The cycle is Inequality → Disaster → Unequal Recovery → Deeper Inequality → Next Disaster

When that Dalit family in Kerala was turned away from a relief centre, the issue was not access to a building. It was access to protection itself- who is considered entitled to it, and who is not.

Climate change is often framed as a shared crisis. But its impacts are not shared equally, and its costs are not distributed randomly. They follow the structure of the system they move through.

Disasters do not redraw those lines. They deepen them.

Sources

Tag: Age

Risk VI – How Disasters Amplify Systemic Injustice

Share this: