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) The abolitionist leader’s former home sits serenely atop a grassy hill in the otherwise bustling neighborhood. It is one of Monica Sanders’s final stops on an overcast December afternoon. Facing the property, she holds her iPhone out to measure Wi-Fi speeds. The readings flutter between single and double digits before settling on a final result: 10.8 megabits per second download and 8.23 Mbps upload. Much faster than dial-up, to be sure. But these speeds fail to meet the Federal Communications Commission’s minimum to qualify as broadband service, despite the multiple free municipal Wi-Fi access spots in the area. 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.