Social equity in community disaster funding

Government funding for environmental disasters and climate adaptation can strongly influence community recovery and resilience-building. Yet given funding is often distributed via competitive schemes, inequities may arise if allocation is determined by factors such as cost effectiveness rather than need. Consequently, disadvantaged communities may receive inadequate support and be highly vulnerable to future disasters. We examine whether federal government community grants following the Australian 2019/20 Black Summer Bushfires were distributed equitably. Using detailed grant-level data including where the grant activity took place, the recipient organisation, and the amount awarded, we find that even after controlling for physical exposure to the fires, communities that are more vulnerable by demographics (e.g., more children, elderly people, non-working individuals, and First Nations people) receive less. Communities with larger ethnic minority populations also get less though this result is not as robust. Conversely, communities with greater built environment vulnerability (i.e., more remote) receive more. We demonstrate that lower funding for demographics and minority vulnerable communities manifest mostly via grants targeting economic and social outcomes whilst higher funding for built environment vulnerable communities is largely driven by infrastructure grants. Furthermore, inequities persist across organisation types including government institutions, which are expected to more carefully consider equity compared to non-government organisations. Finally, the observed inequities hold even across grants received by the same organisation. Altogether, our findings suggest a tension in competitive grant schemes between targeting need and funding projects that are more likely to be successful and cost effective, resulting in socially vulnerable communities receiving less.