Environmental Justice: Social Disparities in Environmental Exposures and Health: Overview

Objective exposure to road traffic noise, noise annoyance and self-rated poor health – framing the relationship between noise and health as a matter of multiple stressors and resources in urban neighbourhoods

“…For this reason, we created a multiple stressor variable accounting for their single occurrence and their concurrence. As implied by socio-environmental models of multiple stressors (Gee and Payne-Sturges 2004;Morello-Frosch and Shenassa 2006;Bolte, Pauli, and Hornberg 2011), their single and combined effect on self-rated health could be influenced by other multiple psychosocial resources (or the lack of them). In our conceptual model, we therefore inserted three psychosocial factors environmental planning should consider as characteristic of vulnerable groups (van Kamp and Davies 2013) or could exert influence on (Barton 2009) (Figure 1).…”

“…Due to a lack of resources, pre-existing ill-health might enhance vulnerability to road traffic noise, intensify noise annoyance and reinforce loss of other health-related resources (Job 1996;Bolte, Pauli, and Hornberg 2011). We selected self-reported hearing disability as a health-related variable influencing traffic-related noise annoyance on the one hand and self-rated health on the other.…”

“…During the last decade, several conceptual frameworks have been proposed explaining local variations in exposures to environmental stressors and resources, as well as their potential health effects in relation to social positions of communities and their residents . In these models of multiple stressors (Gee and Payne-Sturges 2004;Morello-Frosch and Shenassa 2006;Bolte, Pauli, and Hornberg 2011), the interplay of environmental stressors and resources on both community (neighbourhood) and individual levels are described as key mechanisms underlying environmental health inequalities: *Corresponding author. Email: natalie.riedel@udo.edu…”

Assessing the relationship between objective and subjective indicators of residential exposure to road traffic noise in the context of environmental justice

“…This is why studies on noise annoyance accord little relevance to education and other socio-economic factors, whereas studies on distributive environmental justice conceptualise education as a key influence indicating social position, environmental health knowledge and coping (see the Introduction). However, results might differ by the indicators used for social position (Bolte, Pauli, and Hornberg 2011). In the German study quoted above (Kohlhuber et al 2006), lower educational levels were significantly linked to perceptions of noise exposure in bivariate analyses; however, this association was statistically explained away by adjusting for other socio-demographic and -economic factors (Kohlhuber et al 2006).…”

Spatial urban health equity indicators – a framework-based approach supporting spatial decision making

“…among (subgroups of) a population or not. Population based studies take into account the social determinants of health, such as income, ethnicities, welfare, or payments [11,12]. The Rainbow model of Dahlgren and Whitehead [13] on the determinants of health shows various spheres of social and economic life and the wider environment having an impact on health of individuals, stressing that all these spheres are themselves affected by the changes in the built environment in complex and interacting ways [11].…”