Abstract

The risks, impacts, and responses to hazards and disasters are inequitably distributed: race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic and educational status, and other demographic factors inform communities’ risk levels, response capacity, and overall vulnerability. Moreover, disasters themselves can accelerate pre-existing social trends, often intensifying existing inequities. The entanglement between equity, justice, and disaster is evident in both high-income, developed locations – Hurricanes Harvey and Katrina disproportionately affected low-income, Black, and Latinx communities in the United States, for example – and in low-income, developing states, especially those that are former and current colonial possessions. Clear-eyed awareness of the connections between equity, justice, and disaster is essential to advancing equitable disaster risk reduction policy and to conducting reflexive disaster research; in this session, we invite panelists to discuss recent scholarship on these complicated connections.