Environmental justice analyses may hide inequalities in Indigenous people’s exposure to lead in Mount Isa, Queensland

Abstract

Distributive environmental justice studies frequently identify how ethnic minorities and communities of low socio-economic status (SES) are disproportionately likely to live in areas with an elevated risk of exposure to pollution. Few distributive justice studies have been conducted in Australia to explore whether this relationship is relevant to rural mining communities. In the remote mining city of Mount Isa, studies have found higher geometric mean blood lead levels (BLLs) among Indigenous children compared to non-Indigenous children. However, there is a lack of recent BLL data to determine conclusively if Indigenous children in Mount Isa are disproportionately exposed to lead pollution. We employed a common distributive environmental justice analysis approach to determine if Indigenous residents are disproportionately likely to live in areas with elevated soil lead concentrations. We analysed soil samples from 49 of 51 census areas at the Statistical Area 1 (SA1) level and measured the statistical correlation between soil lead concentration and the percentage of residents living in each SA1 who were of Indigenous status using Kendall’s tau and linear regression. We found little evidence of an association between soil lead concentration and either Indigenous status or SES, indicating that Indigenous and low-SES residents are not disproportionately likely to live in areas with elevated concentrations of soil lead. The results of this study, along with prior research on mining emissions and housing quality in Mount Isa, indicate that elevated BLLs among Indigenous children may be due to low-SES increasing the risk of exposure as a result of lower quality housing. Actions by governing and mining bodies to address children’s elevated BLLs in Mount Isa should give greater attention to risk factors related to SES. Furthermore, distributive environmental justice research must account for disparities in exposure which are not the result of disproportionate proximity to polluting sources.