One Book 2023-2024: Environmental Justice & No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

Natural Disasters & Extreme Weather

Featured Resources by Source Type: Extreme Weather

Featured Organizations & Online Resources

Climate.gov
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
Our mission is helping people before, during and after disasters. Our core values and goals help us achieve it.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
"The Environmental Protection Agency is an independent executive agency of the United States federal government tasked with environmental protection matters."
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: Climate Change
U.S. Geological Survey: Climate and Land Use Change
UNEP: Climate Change
[United Nations Environment Program]
Washington State Department of Ecology: Climate Change
The National Drought Mitigation Center
"The National Drought Mitigation Center’s mission is to reduce the effects of drought on people, the environment and the economy by researching the science of drought monitoring and the practice of drought planning."

Featured Articles

Use the links below to find articles from different publication types.

Reference Articles

These background or overview articles are useful for defining and understanding the history and key concepts of a topic. They come from subject-specific books and reports and aim to help you understand the basics. Find more articles like these in the databases Gale Ebooks, Opposing Viewpoints, or CQ Researcher.

Natural Disaster Refugees A 2015 article from The SAGE Encyclopedia of World Poverty
Extreme Weather "Will global warming produce more disasters?" A 2019 report from CQ Researcher
Extreme Weather 2021, The Gale Encyclopedia of Science

Popular Source Articles

These kinds of articles are from mainstream publications like the "Washington Post," "The Atlantic," or other publications aimed at the general public., as well as a wide variety of websites, both commercial, educational, and governmental. Find more sources like this in Academic Search Complete, ProQuest Combined, or Science In Context.

Heat and Housing: A Link between Historic Racism and Current Environmental Inequities
With No Time to Lose, We Must Keep Score Editorial, American Forests. Fall2021: The country is emerging from a global pandemic that has magnified health inequities, especially in terms of income and race. And climate change is moving faster than expected. During one week in June, for example, there were killer heat waves in the cool Pacific Northwest and flooding in the Great Lakes region.
Communities of Color are the ‘First and Worst’ Hurt by Climate Change; Urgent Action Needed to Change Course
July 5, 2021 Seattle Times editorial by Naomi Ishisaka

Scholarly Articles

Scholarly journal articles are written by scholars/experts/researchers for others in their field with the aim of sharing, reviewing, and building new information. These publications can give us insight into the ways that environmental justice topics are being studied at a research-based, academic levels. Find more articles like these in ProQuest Combined, Agricola, OR Global Issues in Context.

Connecting the Dots Between Mass Incarceration, Health Inequity, and Climate Change American journal of public health, Jan. 2020 Mass incarceration is a social problem with severe public health consequences. This is slightly different from calling it a public health problem. It might sound like splitting hairs, but the distinction has ramifications for how public health positions itself in this moment of political, economic, and environmental crisis. Perhaps unexpectedly, climate scientists are leading the call to address social inequality and the climate emergency simultaneously or face catastrophically worsening inequities.1 We have only a decade to roughly halve carbon emissions or risk calamitous levels of warming that would cause hundreds of millions to suffer and die prematurely.1 Indeed, the climate movement has mainstreamed the idea that we cannot avoid environmental catastrophe without fundamentally transforming our economy and society. Prison abolitionists and public health advocates have long made analogous arguments when they describe the fundamental causes of mass incarceration and health disparities as systems of extraction, exploitation, domination, racism, and heteropatriarchy. But mass incarceration, health inequity, and the climate emergency are all intertwined, in more than an analogy and in ways that no single field can address on its own.
Dimensions of Thermal Inequity: Neighborhood Social Demographics and Urban Heat in the Southwestern U.S International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2021. Exposure to heat is a growing public health concern as climate change accelerates worldwide. Different socioeconomic and racial groups often face unequal exposure to heat as well as increased heat-related sickness, mortality, and energy costs.
From Urban Resilience to Abolitionist Climate Justice in Washington, DC.
Antipode. Jan2021
Households and Heat Stress: Estimating the Distributional Consequences of Climate Change June 2018 Environment and Development Economics. Recent research documents the adverse causal impacts on health and productivity of extreme heat, which will worsen with climate change. In this paper, we assess the current distribution of heat exposure within countries, to explore possible distributional consequences of climate change through temperature. Combining survey data from 690,745 households across 52 countries with spatial data on climate, this paper suggests that the welfare impacts of added heat stress may be regressive within countries. We find: (1) a strong negative correlation between household wealth and warmer temperature in many hot countries; (2) a strong positive correlation between household wealth and warmer temperatures in many cold countries; and (3) that poorer individuals are more likely to work in occupations with greater exposure. While our analysis is descriptive rather than causal, our results suggest a larger vulnerability of poor people to heat extremes, and potentially significant distributional and poverty implications of climate change.
There’s a Storm A‐Coming: Ecological Resilience and Resistance to Extreme Weather Events Ecology and Evolution, Nov 2020 Extreme weather events (EWEs) are expected to increase in stochasticity, frequency, and intensity due to climate change. Documented effects of EWEs, such as droughts, hurricanes, and temperature extremes, range from shifting community stable states to species extirpations. To date, little attention has been paid to how populations resist and/or recover from EWEs through compensatory (behavioral, demographic, or physiological) mechanisms; limiting the capacity to predict species responses to future changes in EWEs.

Featured Videos

There are some DVDs you can check out from the library on environmental topics as well. The links here, however, are largely for online videos as there are so many great organizations with content. Streaming education films can also be searched in the database Films on Demand, linked in the "Digging Deeper in Your Research" tab of this guide, or from the library's homepage.

Earth Emergency A 50+min documentary distributed by PBS, streaming on Films on Demand
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Narrated by Richard Gere and featuring the Dalai Lama and Greta Thunberg, Earth Emergency explores how human activity sets in motion Earth’s own natural warming mechanisms, releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and further warming the planet. Leading climate scientists examine this missing piece of the climate puzzle which is pushing the climate to a tipping point.
Climate Change: The Facts A 57+ minute BBC Worldwide Learning film, streaming on Films on Demand, 2021
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"After one of the hottest years on record, Sir David Attenborough looks at the science of climate change and potential solutions to this global threat. Interviews with some of the world’s leading climate scientists explore recent extreme weather conditions such as unprecedented storms and catastrophic wildfires. They also reveal what dangerous levels of climate change could mean for both human populations and the natural world in the future."
Meeting the Challenge of Climate Change A 2021 film, streaming on Films on Demand, ~30 minutes
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"This film examines the connection between poor community design and burgeoning health costs based upon key public health indices: obesity, diabetes, heart disease, asthma, cancer and depression, a concept first researched by Dr. Richard Jackson, a pediatrician turned public health officer."
Climate Change, Chaos, and The Little Ice Age A ~10 minute video from Crash Course World History
Futuropolis A 2017, two-part series about future life in the light of environmental challenges, focusing specifically in megacities like Singapore. Streaming on Films on Demand
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More than any city in the world, Singapore is a laboratory for urban development and the best place to figure out how life will look like in megacities at the end of the 21st century. With extensive computer generated imagery, Futuropolis explores the concepts, ideas and innovations required to face the challenges of the coming decades. It is a thrilling exploration of the city of tomorrow which most likely will be vertical and floating.
Is THIS the Real Reason Weather is Getting Wilder? A short video from PBS Terra

Featured Podcasts

Linked below are some well-known podcasts pertaining to climate change and other environmental issues

The Sustainable Jungle Podcast
"The Sustainable Jungle Podcast is a mission driven show, focusing on solutions for the world’s sustainability and conservation challenges. ...Join us as we create a place to encourage and galvanize positive change."
The Yikes Podcast
"Yikes is a podcast which leans into the Yikes of the world rather than letting it overwhelm us. We breakdown the issues in an accessible intersectional and nuanced way to guide us towards action together"
Broken Ground Podcast
Broken Ground is a podcast by the Southern Environmental Law Center

Featured Books & eBooks - click on titles to access

Race, Place, and Environmental Justice after Hurricane Katrina : Struggles to Reclaim, Rebuild, and Revitalize New Orleans and the Gulf Coast

Global Weirdness: Severe Storms, Deadly Heat Waves, Relentless Drought, Rising Seas, and the Weather of the Future

Main Collection

Floods, Droughts, and Climate Change

Main Collection

Search Tips & Terms

Search Terms & Topics

Consider searching some of these topics as search words when trying to locate resources in the library's collection.

Drought
Flooding & Flash Floods
Earthquakes
Lahars & Tsunamis
Hurricanes
Tornados
Tropical Storms
Extreme Heat
Wildfires
Gas, oil, and chemical leaks or spills