How climate vulnerability and the digital divide are linked

The Wi-Fi signal is weak outside the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in Anacostia, a historic African-American section of Washington, DC. It is one of Monica Sanders’s final stops on an overcast December afternoon. Sanders, an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University, isn’t just checking Wi-Fi speeds. She’s drawing connections between a host of indicators at the intersection of internet availability, environmental risk, and historical racial inequity. The findings will be added to a report that Sanders and her colleagues are assembling for the Undivide Project, a nonprofit she launched in 2022. The organization conducts research pro bono for communities to help them document evidence of the digital divide—the gap between areas with and without adequate internet access—as well as the root causes and linked effects of this discrepancy.  So far, her findings in Anacostia fit a pattern Sanders has noticed walking around low-income majority-minority neighborhoods throughout the US: a lack of internet access mirrors other inequities. In neighborhoods shaped by racism and insufficient infrastructure investment, among other structural choices, residents can face disproportionate risk from climate change, affecting everything from flood vulnerability to the ability to get disaster warnings.