Racist policy caused climate vulnerability. Restorative policy is the remedy.

Last month, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals delivered a sobering message to residents of Jackson, Mississippi, who had sued over the city’s troubled water system. The residents alleged government failures had exposed them to lead-contaminated drinking water that officials assured them was safe. Unfortunately, they did not get the remedy they sought.

This decision raises a critical question: What does justice require when the government has helped create conditions that make a community vulnerable in the first place?

Climate change does not arrive on neutral ground. Its threats are colliding with a geography of vulnerability and inequality that America spent generations constructing. During the era of legal segregation, policies including redlining racially restrictive covenants, exclusionary zoning, discriminatory lending and infrastructure development helped confine Black families to neighborhoods more likely to be flood-prone, polluted, near industrial facilities or otherwise environmentally vulnerable. The end of formal segregation did not erase that geography.

In many Black communities, segregation was followed by decades of public and private disinvestment . Water systems aged. Drainage infrastructure deteriorated. Housing declined. Trees and green spaces disappeared or were never planted. Public transportation suffered. Municipal tax bases eroded.

And neglect was only half of the story. Even as governments failed to invest adequately in Black communities, they continued to ask those communities to bear a disproportionate share of society’s burdens. Highways tore through Black neighborhoods. Polluting industries clustered nearby. We constructed inequality and vulnerability layer by layer.

Now climate change is colliding with everything we built. A neighborhood with inadequate drainage becomes more vulnerable as extreme rainfall intensifies. A community with few trees and acres of heat-absorbing pavement becomes more dangerous as temperatures rise. An aging electrical grid becomes more consequential when extreme heat makes air conditioning a matter of life and death. Fragile water systems become more precarious under flooding, drought and other climate stresses.

And families denied generations of wealth accumulation have fewer resources to evacuate, rebuild, absorb rising utility and insurance costs or move somewhere safer. Climate change did not create these inequalities. But it is magnifying them.

There is another collision we have tried to ignore — between climate change and our nation’s extraordinary capacity to tolerate Black suffering. In addition to the residents of Jackson, think of Flint, Michigan , where residents spent years fighting for safe drinking water, or Gary, Indiana , where for nearly two weeks in August residents had no power — all while a private utility worked its way, unhurried, through a restoration list.

Different cities. Different systems. But they raise the same disturbing question: What conditions have we decided are acceptable when the people living with them are Black? There are communities whose suffering triggers urgent intervention and others whose suffering becomes part of the background. Climate change threatens to make the consequences of that hierarchy far more severe.

And even our responses to climate change risk reproducing those hierarchies. Governments will spend enormous sums strengthening electrical grids, modernizing water systems, improving drainage, protecting coastlines, planting trees and rebuilding transportation infrastructure. If we follow the patterns of the past, communities with the most wealth and political power will receive protection first and recover fastest.

Climate adaptation must become a civil rights project. That means identifying vulnerability before disaster strikes and directing investment toward communities where segregation, disinvestment, environmental burdens and infrastructure neglect have compounded over generations. It means rebuilding water and energy systems, strengthening housing, improving drainage, expanding green infrastructure and ensuring reliable transportation. And it means giving residents meaningful power over the investments that will determine whether their communities survive and whether they can remain to enjoy the benefits.

The vulnerability facing many Black communities was not inevitable. It was built through decisions about where people could live, where the government would invest, where infrastructure would be placed, which communities would be protected and which could be neglected.

Generations of policy helped construct vulnerability. Governments now have an obligation to construct resilience. The climate crisis is going to force America to build. We will spend billions deciding which places to protect, which infrastructure to strengthen, and which communities to prepare for a more dangerous future.

The question is not whether we will build. It is whether we will reproduce the racial geography we inherited — or finally begin to dismantle it.

We built this vulnerability. Now we have to build something different.

Deborah Archer is president of the American Civil Liberties Union and a professor of law at New York University.