Abstract
Polluting facilities and hazardous sites are often concentrated in low-income communities of color already facing additional stressors to their health. The influence of socioeconomic status is not considered in traditional models of risk assessment. We describe a pilot study of a screening method that considers both pollution burden and population characteristics in assessing the potential for cumulative impacts. The goal is to identify communities that warrant further attention and to thereby provide actionable guidance to decision- and policy-makers in achieving environmental justice. The method uses indicators related to five components to develop a relative cumulative impact score for use in comparing communities: exposures, public health effects, environmental effects, sensitive populations and socioeconomic factors. Here, we describe several methodological considerations in combining disparate data sources and report on the results of sensitivity analyses meant to guide future improvements in cumulative impact assessments. We discuss criteria for the selection of appropriate indicators, correlations between them, and consider data quality and the influence of choices regarding model structure. We conclude that the results of this model are largely robust to changes in model structure.
Highlights
Environmental justice advocates and scholars have documented the disproportionate pollution burden experienced by many low-income communities of color in California [1,2,3] and elsewhere in the U.S [4,5,6]
This paper considers methodological issues in combining disparate data sources related to cumulative impacts
We report on several sensitivity analyses that examine the robustness of the results to changes in the model structure and scoring regime
Summary
Environmental justice advocates and scholars have documented the disproportionate pollution burden experienced by many low-income communities of color in California [1,2,3] and elsewhere in the U.S [4,5,6]. Polluting facilities are often concentrated in low-income communities that already face additional challenges to their health, such as limited access to health care, substandard housing, a lack of open space or recreational facilities, poor access to healthful food, and higher levels of stress stemming from poverty, under-employment or high rates of crime. This concept of “double jeopardy” [7]—the combination and potential interaction of socioeconomic stressors and elevated exposure to hazards—is absent in traditional risk assessment methods. Unlike traditional risk assessment methodologies, this method utilizes a framework that considers the presence of sensitive populations and socioeconomic factors in addition to pollution burden in accordance with the National Research Council’s call for risk assessments that consider “nonchemical stressors, vulnerability, and background risk factors” [9] and the working definition of cumulative impacts adopted by the California Environmental Protection
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