Visualizing Environmental Justice Issues in Urban Areas with a Community-based Approach
Abstract
According to environmental justice, environmental degradation and benefits should not be disproportionately shared between communities. Identifying disparities in the spatial distribution of environmental degradation is therefore a prerequisite for validating the state of environmental justice in a geographic region. Under ideal circumstances, environmental risk assessment is a preferred metric, but only when exposure levels have been quantified reliably after estimating the risk. In this study, we adopt a proximity burden metric caused by adjacent hazardous sources, allowing us to evaluate the environmental burden distribution and vulnerability to pollution sources. In close collaboration with a predominantly Latinx community in Chicago, we highlight the usefulness of our approach through a case study that shows how certain community areas in the city are likely to bear a disproportionate burden of environmental pollution caused by industrial roads.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2112.06119,
title = {Visualizing Environmental Justice Issues in Urban Areas with a Community-based Approach},
author = {Joel Flax-Hatch and Sanjana Srabanti and Fabio Miranda and Apostolis Sambanis and Michael D. Cailas},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.06119},
year = {2021}
}