Constructing Valid Geospatial Tools for Environmental Justice (2024) / Chapter Skim
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2 Background and Definitions
2 Background and Definitions
Pages 23-50
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The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the magnitudes of individual stressors, the presence of multiple stressors, and the interaction across stressors might be considered contributors to disadvantage. A discussion of how different measures may be incorporated into geospatial environmental justice (EJ)
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While the Justice40 Initiative recognizes both nongeographic and geographic communities, geospatial tools such as CEJST BOX 2.1 What Is Redlining? Redlining refers to the discriminatory practice of conditioning access to mort gage lending and insurance on the racial composition of neighborhoods.
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. Geographic communities may also be influenced by the policies and situations that establish, sustain, and otherwise impact the social determinants of health.
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Nevertheless, there are scientific principles and empirical evidence that provide a foundation for operational and actionable definitions of community disadvantage and related concepts. Community disadvantage results from a complex interplay of factors that inhibit or prevent people in some communities from achieving the positive life outcomes that are commonly expected in a society.
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Economic Explanations Economic explanations of disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards focus on market dynamics. The spatial concentration of environmentally hazardous facilities in areas that are predominantly composed of people of color and various socioeconomically disadvantaged communities is a consequence of market forces that encourage industries to look for inexpensive land and labor.
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. Earlier scholarship and legal theory focused on interpersonal discrimination and questions of racist intent, but the focus has now shifted to understanding the role of historical and current institutional actions and structures that lead to racially unequal and discriminatory outcomes -- referred to as systemic, institutional, or structural racism.
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, structural racism refers to "the totality of ways in which societies foster racial discrimination through mutually reinforcing systems of housing, education, employment, earnings, benefits, credit, media, health care, and criminal justice. These patterns and practices, in turn, reinforce discriminatory beliefs, values, and distribution of resources." Key to this conceptualization of racism is the understanding that systematic differences between racial and ethnic groups in socioeconomic status, wealth, education, political power, and health are a consequence of historical, social, institutional, or political circumstances and are not reflective of innate biological or cultural differences ascribable to race or ethnicity itself.
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. The interlocking systems of structural racism and their cascading effects on social and health inequities can be understood in consideration of the exclusion of Black people from housing and intergenerational wealth accumulation (Brown, 2022; Chadha et al., 2020)
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. Scholars have identified residential segregation as a pillar in the foundation of structural racism and a direct contributor to racialized health inequities (Bailey et al., 2017)
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identified 20 research articles assessing structural racism across the domains of residential neighborhood/housing, perceived racism in social institutions, SES, criminal justice, immigration and border enforcement, political participation, and workplace environment. These studies found that structural racism was associated with mental and physical impacts, including stress, anxiety, poor psychological well-being, colorectal cancer survival, myocardial infarction, mean arterial blood pressure, episodic memory function, behavioral changes, poor adherence to hypertensive treatment, and delayed HIV testing across the population.
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This is not surprising given the ease of data availability and the well-documented association of residential segregation with environmental and health inequities (see, e.g., Bravo et al., 2016; Jones et al., 2014; Kodros et al., 2022; Kramer and Hogue, 2009; Morello-Frosch and Jesdale, 2006; Morello-Frosch and Lopez, 2006; Rice et al., 2014; Woo et al., 2019; Yitshak-Sade et al., 2020. More recently, scholars have argued that structural racism needs to be measured using an index method that better reflects its multidimensional nature (Adkins-Jackson et al., 2022; Dean and Thorpe, 2022; Furtado et al., 2023)
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Within the health sciences, structural racism is identified as a fundamental cause of health inequities and a key element of the social determinants of health. Scholars advise that structural racism is best measured through a multidimensional index that reflects a theoretical understanding of the phenomenon of racism for a given domain or set of domains, institutional context, and population of concern.
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Social Vulnerability Disproportionate exposure stemming from economic, sociopolitical, and racial discrimination processes is not the only major mode of societal marginalization pertinent to environmental injustice. Some of the same populations experiencing persistent exposure and exclusion are also less resistant to its effects due to marginalization-induced social vulnerability.
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. The major questions raised about social vulnerability indexes surround their fit for policy application (Hinkel, 2011)
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The implication of this approach is an underestimation of the burden impact of the stressor for groups that have relatively high or extreme magnitudes of exposure. MULTIPLE STRESSORS Many EJ studies examine impacts based only on single environmental stressors.
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. Within the broad scholar ship on environmental justice, race and class have dominated discussions about the underlying demographic factors that explain or predict environmental inequalities, sometimes as competing theories about causation.
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Chronic health conditions, reduced sensory or cognitive capacity, coupled with commonly lower socioeconomic status can mean lower resilience and greater need for support or assistance for older adults and the elderly (Phraknoi et al., 2023)
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provide an example of an analytical framework for measuring the impacts of multiple stressors in a clear and transparent manner, in this case, pollution; Figure 2.2 provides a graphic illustration. Individual indicators are averaged into groupings of related indicators such as exposures, public health and environmental effects of the exposures, sensitive populations, and socioeconomic factors.
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. What is not well understood, for example, is if the impact of multiple stressors on populations is akin to the sum of their individual effects, or if the total burden occurs through synergism in which stressors and populations interact and amplify one another and result in greater cumulative impacts.
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. The collaborative nonprofit, Coming Clean, Inc., and its strategic partner, the Environmental Justice Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform, define cumulative impacts as the combination of nonchemical and chemical stressors on health, quality of life, and well-being.
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National The interaction among multiple stressors within a NEJAC (2004) Environmental Justice population or community where individuals differ based Advisory Council on susceptibility, exposure, preparedness, and resilience (ability to recover)
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Tit. 14, § 15355 -- Cumulative Impacts State of Vermont The cumulative impacts of environmental harms S.148 -- An Senate disproportionately and adversely impact the health Act Relating to of BIPOC and communities with low income, with Environmental Justice climate change functioning as a threat multiplier.
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Extrinsic social vulnerability factors at the individual and community levels may amplify the effects of environmental hazards Collaborative (Community and advocates) definition Coming Clean Inc.
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(6-120) FIGURE 2.1 Example analytical framework for measuring the impacts of multiple stressors; in this example, chemical stressors (pollution)
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. For the purposes of this report, cumulative impacts are defined as the total burden -- adverse, neutral, or beneficial -- from stressors, their interactions, and the environment that affects the health, well-being, and quality of life of an individual, community, or population at a given point in time and that accumulates over time (EPA, 2022a)
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Research demonstrates an association of race or ethnicity with disproportionate exposure to environmental stressors, and historical and current structural racism has led to persistent disparities and outcomes for communities of
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Care needs to be taken to avoid treating people of color as a monolithic group. The next chapter of this report reviews good practices for composite indicator construction, with special reference to supporting EJ screening and analysis tools.
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