Alignment of Air Pollution Exposure Inequality Metrics with Environmental Justice and Equity Goals in the United States

Abstract

A growing literature within the field of air pollution exposure assessment addresses the issue of environmental justice. Leveraging the increasing availability of exposure datasets with broad spatial coverage and high spatial resolution, a number of works have assessed inequalities in exposure across racial/ethnic and other socioeconomic groupings. However, environmental justice research presents the additional need to evaluate exposure inequity-inequality that is systematic, unfair, and avoidable-which may be framed in several ways. We discuss these framings and describe inequality and inequity conclusions provided from several contrasting approaches drawn from recent work. We recommend that future work addressing environmental justice interventions include complementary "Exposure-driven" and "Socially weighted" metrics, taking an intersectional view of areas and social groups that are both disproportionately impacted by pollution and are impacted by additional health risks resulting from structural racism and consider implications for environmental justice beyond distributional equity.

Keywords: air pollution; environmental equity; environmental justice.

Figure 1

Summary of conceptual framings.

Figure 2

Metrics for evaluating exposure in an environmental justice framework. Green boxes show the four conceptual framings of environmental justice discussed here, gray boxes show metrics used to quantify exposure inequality, and labeled arrows indicate the application of those metrics to support each framework.