Moreover, these communities are likely to face greater flood exposure in a changing climate (McNeill et al. Indeed, a few studies have documented that Canadian Indigenous communities bear significant financial, psychological, and social burdens associated with flooding, and they have been disproportionately affected by flood-related displacement (Thompson et al. Waldram ( 1988) argued that Indigenous communities around the world are the most vulnerable to the impacts of flooding, because they have been forced to live on marginal land and in remote locations to make room for settlers. ![]() Research has revealed ways to locate and quantify socially vulnerable populations, which have been useful to design targeted risk reduction and awareness building strategies to reduce social vulnerability (Wisner et al. Vulnerability to hazards and disasters represents “the degree of potential for loss the propensity or predisposition to be adversely affected or circumstances that put people at risk” (Mavhura et al. 2016), are also implicated.īroader scholarship suggests that persistent social and economic inequalities exacerbate the social vulnerability of marginalized and socially deprived communities (Cutter 1995), which results in greater susceptibility of vulnerable groups to the impacts of environmental hazards (Cutter et al. ![]() But other factors, such as environmental and social injustice (Thompson 2015) and inequalities in education, employment, and income opportunities (Anderson et al. Indigenous disadvantage and marginalization persist in part due to Canada’s colonial legacy and the intergenerational effects of residential schools (Reading and Wein 2009). A growing body of research has shown disparities in socioeconomic status of Indigenous populations relative to benchmark populations and other Canadian communities (Hajizadeh et al. Indigenous communities in Canada, including First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples living on- and off-reserve, are often identified as among the populations most socially vulnerable to climate change (Ford 2012). Findings suggest the need for more local verification of flood risk in Indigenous communities to address uncertainty in national scale analysis. Our analysis indicates that residential property-level flood exposure is similar between non-Indigenous and Indigenous communities, but socioeconomic vulnerability is higher on reserve lands, which confirms that the overall risk of Indigenous communities is higher. We found that about 81% of the 985 Indigenous land reserves had some flood exposure that impacted either population or residential properties. Geographic information system-based bivariate choropleth mapping of the composite SVI scores and of flood exposure of residential properties and population was completed to assess the spatial variation of flood risk. A social vulnerability index (SVI) was developed and included 49 variables from the national census that represent demographic, social, economic, cultural, and infrastructure/community indicators of vulnerability. ![]() National-scale exposure of residential properties to fluvial, pluvial, and coastal flooding was estimated at the 100-year return period. This study integrates novel data on 100-year flood hazard extents, exposure of residential properties, and place-based social vulnerability to comprehensively assess and compare flood risk between Indigenous communities living on 985 reserve lands and other Canadian communities across 3701 census subdivisions.
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