Retooling CalEnviroScreen: Cumulative Pollution Burden and Race-Based Environmental Health Vulnerabilities in California.

Raoul Liévanos

doi:10.3390/ijerph15040762

Abstract

The California Community Environmental Health Screening Tool (CalEnviroScreen) advances research and policy pertaining to environmental health vulnerability. However, CalEnviroScreen departs from its historical foundations and comparable screening tools by no longer considering racial status as an indicator of environmental health vulnerability and predictor of cumulative pollution burden. This study used conceptual frameworks and analytical techniques from environmental health and inequality literature to address the limitations of CalEnviroScreen, especially its inattention to race-based environmental health vulnerabilities. It developed an adjusted measure of cumulative pollution burden from the CalEnviroScreen 2.0 data that facilitates multivariate analyses of the effect of neighborhood racial composition on cumulative pollution burden, net of other indicators of population vulnerability, traffic density, industrial zoning, and local and regional clustering of pollution burden. Principal component analyses produced three new measures of population vulnerability, including Latina/o cumulative disadvantage that represents the spatial concentration of Latinas/os, economic disadvantage, limited English-speaking ability, and health vulnerability. Spatial error regression analyses demonstrated that concentrations of Latinas/os, followed by Latina/o cumulative disadvantage, are the strongest demographic determinants of adjusted cumulative pollution burden. Findings have implications for research and policy pertaining to cumulative impacts and race-based environmental health vulnerabilities within and beyond California.

Highlights

The smaller Akaike information criterion (AIC) values and larger log likelihood values shown for Model 2 in Table 6 suggest it best fits the data [71,73]. These findings indicate that the effect of racial segregation on cumulative pollution burden is perhaps best captured when using the percent Latina/o population in a census tract alongside the other indicators of population vulnerability, emission sources, and spatial dynamics included in Model 2
This study demonstrated how cumulative impact mapping tools, such as CalEnviroScreen, can be merged with additional data to illuminate the enduring significant effect that race-based vulnerabilities have on the distribution of cumulative environmental health hazards
The findings from this study suggest that racial segregation, in general, and the spatial concentration of Latinas/os, in particular, is significantly associated with the cumulative disadvantages of social, health, and environmental burdens in California

Summary

Introduction

Episodic political and legal disputes occurred in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States over environmentally hazardous working and residential conditions for various nonwhite and low-income populations [1,2]. Prominent EJ and civil rights advocate, Reverend Benjamin Chavis, associated these findings in 1992 with the broader problem of “environmental racism.”. This problem is typically understood as the unequal enforcement of environmental laws; systematic exclusion from environmental science, movements, and policy making; and the disproportionate burden of environmental health threats experienced by racial minorities where they live, work, play, pray, and learn [4,5,6].

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Discussion

Conclusion