Abstract
Communities across Washington State have expressed the need for neighborhood-level information on the cumulative impact of environmental hazards and social conditions to illuminate disparities and address environmental justice issues. Many existing mapping tools have not explicitly integrated community voice and lived experience as an integral part of their development. The goals of this project were to create a new community–academic–government partnership to collect and summarize community concerns and to develop a publicly available mapping tool that ranks relative environmental health disparities for populations across Washington State. Using a community-driven framework, we developed the Washington Environmental Health Disparities Map, a cumulative environmental health impacts assessment tool. Nineteen regularly updated environmental and population indicators were integrated into the geospatial tool that allows for comparisons of the cumulative impacts between census tracts. This interactive map provides critical information for the public, agencies, policymakers, and community-based organizations to make informed decisions. The unique community–academic–government partnership and the community-driven framework can be used as a template for other environmental and social justice mapping endeavors.
Highlights
Institutional environmental justice (EJ) initiatives have focused on promoting environmental equity and social justice through the meaningful involvement of impacted communities and equitableInt
In early 2017, the Washington EJ Mapping Work Group was initiated by Front and Centered, an EJ coalition of organizations rooted in communities of color, in partnership with Puget Sound Sage, University of Washington Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences (DEOHS), the Washington State Department of Health (DOH) Washington Tracking Network (WTN) program, the state Department of Ecology (ECY), and the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency (PSCAA), a regional air quality management agency
The CalEnviroScreen model focused on producing cumulative impact scoring across a variety of environmental hazards and population characteristics for communities in the state as opposed to evaluating risk based on individual hazards as provided in the EJSCREEN model
Summary
Institutional environmental justice (EJ) initiatives have focused on promoting environmental equity and social justice through the meaningful involvement of impacted communities and equitableInt. Res. Public Health 2019, 16, 4470 distribution of the environmental burdens [1]. Public Health 2019, 16, 4470 distribution of the environmental burdens [1] These efforts are framed as a response to procedural and distributive injustices that have contributed to disparities in exposures to environmental hazards and threaten the health and well-being of communities of color and low-income populations in the United States. Procedural justice addresses the historical imbalances in privilege, power, and representation that effectively exclude these populations from influencing the multitude of environmental decisions that impact communities [1,2,3,4]. In Washington State, there is a need to identify communities where health disparities are likely to occur because of environmental injustices
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