By Sean KiddContributors
Mariya Bezgrebelna
Mon., Aug. 9, 2021
TORSTAR
As any one of us who has seen a person without housing suffering on sweltering summer sidewalks can see, climate change has profound implications for homeless populations worldwide. Extreme temperatures, rising sea levels, and extreme weather events destroy homes and livelihoods, creating homelessness and climate-driven migration.
Major weather events also hit homeless populations the hardest — both due to a lack of adequate shelter and already compromised physical and mental health. The result is illness, injury, and death with the greatest impacts felt by those most marginalized — including girls, women, and Indigenous populations.
People experiencing homelessness and inadequate housing in Toronto are bearing the brunt of these impacts locally, as our summers become more sweltering. They join populations suffering worldwide, be it people fleeing from fires in Australia, surviving floods in Kenya, or with culture and livelihoods threatened in the Arctic.
Our responses to date have been reactive, Band-Aid approaches. In Toronto we have relied upon emergency warming and cooling centres. Many organizations also engage in outreach activities, providing water and other supplies. Weather disaster response plans and efforts to build climate resilience in cities seldom address impoverished populations.
In Toronto we see minimal public access to water, a problem that the pandemic has compounded. The cooler, green spaces of our city that offset the asphalt and concrete “heat island” effect have become even less accessible to local homeless populations through aggressive encampment responses.
Several approaches that are much more promising need to be considered as our governments and communities are forced to come to terms with climate change. Two words capture what is needed: planning and prevention.
First, we need to build upon some of the initial, promising efforts to end chronic homelessness. Not having people subsisting in street environments obviates the need for emergency responses to their exposure to weather extremes. Access to affordable housing and supportive housing models are proven means through which this can be achieved.
Preventing homelessness for those at risk of losing housing is also critical — for once the “vicious cycle” that attends the loss of housing commences, effective responses become increasingly complex and expensive.
Building climate resilience and response plans that incorporate homeless populations, in collaboration with people with lived experience, can help ensure that these measures are effective for all. Better predictive data is also essential so we can move from chasing crises to preventing them.
As the weather worsens, these problems will compound. It would be a mistake to think that here in Toronto we are immune to the climate-driven migration and large-scale displacement that are expanding in low and middle-income countries. Some hard realities are coming, and how we prepare for the most marginalized amongst us will be directly related to how well we as a society are prepared.
Sean Kidd is the chief of psychology at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Mariya Bezgrebelna is a Ph.D student of psychology at York University.
As any one of us who has seen a person without housing suffering on sweltering summer sidewalks can see, climate change has profound implications for homeless populations worldwide. Extreme temperatures, rising sea levels, and extreme weather events destroy homes and livelihoods, creating homelessness and climate-driven migration.
Major weather events also hit homeless populations the hardest — both due to a lack of adequate shelter and already compromised physical and mental health. The result is illness, injury, and death with the greatest impacts felt by those most marginalized — including girls, women, and Indigenous populations.
People experiencing homelessness and inadequate housing in Toronto are bearing the brunt of these impacts locally, as our summers become more sweltering. They join populations suffering worldwide, be it people fleeing from fires in Australia, surviving floods in Kenya, or with culture and livelihoods threatened in the Arctic.
Our responses to date have been reactive, Band-Aid approaches. In Toronto we have relied upon emergency warming and cooling centres. Many organizations also engage in outreach activities, providing water and other supplies. Weather disaster response plans and efforts to build climate resilience in cities seldom address impoverished populations.
In Toronto we see minimal public access to water, a problem that the pandemic has compounded. The cooler, green spaces of our city that offset the asphalt and concrete “heat island” effect have become even less accessible to local homeless populations through aggressive encampment responses.
Several approaches that are much more promising need to be considered as our governments and communities are forced to come to terms with climate change. Two words capture what is needed: planning and prevention.
First, we need to build upon some of the initial, promising efforts to end chronic homelessness. Not having people subsisting in street environments obviates the need for emergency responses to their exposure to weather extremes. Access to affordable housing and supportive housing models are proven means through which this can be achieved.
Preventing homelessness for those at risk of losing housing is also critical — for once the “vicious cycle” that attends the loss of housing commences, effective responses become increasingly complex and expensive.
Building climate resilience and response plans that incorporate homeless populations, in collaboration with people with lived experience, can help ensure that these measures are effective for all. Better predictive data is also essential so we can move from chasing crises to preventing them.
As the weather worsens, these problems will compound. It would be a mistake to think that here in Toronto we are immune to the climate-driven migration and large-scale displacement that are expanding in low and middle-income countries. Some hard realities are coming, and how we prepare for the most marginalized amongst us will be directly related to how well we as a society are prepared.
Sean Kidd is the chief of psychology at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Mariya Bezgrebelna is a Ph.D student of psychology at York University.
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