Visualizing Environmental Justice Issues in Urban Areas with a Community-based Approach

TL;DR

This study presents a community-based visualization method to assess environmental justice issues by mapping pollution burdens, demonstrating disproportionate environmental risks faced by Latinx communities in Chicago.

Contribution

It introduces a proximity burden metric for evaluating environmental disparities, emphasizing community collaboration and spatial analysis in environmental justice assessment.

Findings

Certain Chicago community areas face higher pollution burdens.

The proximity burden metric effectively highlights environmental disparities.

Community collaboration enhances the relevance of environmental assessments.

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.