Bolstering environmental (in)justice claims with a quasi-experimental research design

Environmental Justice in Industrially Contaminated Sites. A Review of Scientific Evidence in the WHO European Region

“…Ten studies addressing distributive justice were carried out in the WHO European Region: Two in Scotland [30,31], two in Germany [32,33], one in England [34], one in Czech Republic [35], and four papers in France (in three studies the same areas were analyzed from different perspectives) [36,37,38,39]. The main characteristics and results of selected studies on distributive justice are reported in Table 2.…”

“…The sources of industrial contamination were: industrial plants taken as a general category [30,32,33,39], coal power plants [34,35], incinerators [36,37,38], and landfills [31]. For the industrial plants, the environmental exposure was assessed/operationalized by using European, national, or local registries for air and soil pollution, never collecting original data.…”

“…The socioeconomic or ethnic characteristics considered in most of the studies were education, employment, housing, income, and presence of foreigners. Inequalities in the presence of foreigners were considered in the studies carried out in Germany [32,33] and in French studies on incinerators [36,37,38]. In the German studies, the presence of foreigners was defined as the proportion of inhabitants without a German citizenship, while in the French studies foreigners (recent immigrants) were defined as the foreigners at the time of the census.…”

“…Therefore, in the French studies, the proportion of persons born abroad was considered among the explanatory variables as a proxy for these dimensions. In some cases, an index of deprivation calculated at area/small-area level considering some socioeconomic domains were used [31,34,39], or constructed ad hoc [30], while in other studies single variables from national census were used [32,33,35,36,37,38]. Only in the study by Riva et al, both socioeconomic and socio-demographic characteristics at individual level and indices of deprivation and social cohesion at area level were used [34].…”

“…The second highlighted a high correlation between percentage of foreigners and exposure to industrial pollution (twice higher in urban areas than rural areas).The Czech study [35] on coalfield areas showed a positive correlation between presence of coal power plants and coal mining and unemployment rate and concentration of ethnic minorities, and a negative correlation with average incomes and pensions and level of education, though the analysis was carried out only at the district level (NUTS 4).The Scottish study on landfills showed that exposure to municipal landfills is concentrated amongst the most deprived areas, and that environmental inequalities around municipal landfill sites have arisen due to a combination of pre-siting and post-siting processes [31]. The three French studies regarding incinerators [36,37,38] showed that towns receiving incinerators had higher unemployment and immigrant rates [36] and that a higher proportion of foreigners and persons born abroad in a town is associated with higher odds that the town receives an incinerator. A social gradient was observed with respect to emissions for each of the socioeconomic variables considered: As the proportion of disadvantaged residents increases in a municipality, incinerator emissions also increases [37].…”