Racial Gradients of Ambient Air Pollution Exposure in Hamilton, Canada

Abstract

Introduction and backgroundThe concept of environmental justice represents the politicized edge of empirical analysis and contested discourse investigating whether socioeconomic position (SEP), race, or both, conditions exposure to environmental health hazards. Environmental justice research takes on a political dimension because the concept infers that not only have the poor and racial minorities been left behind in sharing the benefits of economic development, but that they must also bear a disproportionate burden of costs that arise from the production and consumption sectors. Thus, the justice debate also encompasses issues of fairness in regulatory, planning, and other environmental protection and economic decisions.Research on this topic has advanced furthest in the USA, probably because of the implicit coalition which the justice movement has with broadly based civil rights and racial equality movements. The question of whether race, or SEP, or both, affect exposure and potential exposure permeates the US justice literature. Although some have argued that these questions are unanswerable because race and SEP cannot be disentangled (see Maantay, 2002), the preponderance of evidence in the USA shows that race is associated with exposure öand this conclusion cannot be easily dismissed by scholars or by communities of concern that bear the impacts.In recent years the environmental justice movement has broadened its geographical scope beyond the USA. This has taken many forms, including health concerns over globalization and investment into depressed regions (Westra and Lawson, 2001), and testing whether injustice is present in other developed countries (for example, Jerrett

Identifying inequitable exposure to toxic air pollution in racialized and low-income neighbourhoods to support pollution prevention

“…Environmental justice studies based in the USA have also found a higher proportion of minorities near hazardous facilities (Ash and Fetter, 2004;Pastor et al, 2004), which supports the notion posited by Buzzelli and Jerrett (2004) that "environmental racism" may be a more appropriate term than environmental justice to describe disparities. This is despite the fact that residential segregation is not found to the same degree in Canadian urban areas as it is in the USA (Walks and Bourne, 2006).…”

“…While some Canadian research suggests that inequities may exist in terms of exposure to ambient air pollution (Buzzelli and Jerrett, 2004;Crouse et al, 2009), there is little information characterising the populations living in proximity to industrial polluters in Canada. One such study identified 17 neighbourhoods within the City of Toronto, Canada that had both a high mass of air emissions and a poverty rate above the national average of 11.8%, but the authors did not consider the toxicity of emissions (Rang et al, 2008).…”

The application of three methods to measure the statistical association between different social groups and the concentration of air pollutants in Montreal: A case of environmental equity

“…Moreover, the lower degree of ethnic residential segregation in large Canadian cities compared with their American counterparts might well explain these significantly lower levels of environmental inequity in terms of pollution (Buzzelli and Jerrett, 2004).…”

“…NO2 is the pollutant most often used to measure pollution concentrations generated by road transportation, since it has high co-locational association with other types of pollutants such as PM and CO (Beckerman et al, 2008;Wheeler et al, 2008). Once the pollution measurements are collected at n points across a study area, several different kinds of models can be used to generate a surface map, including geostatistical interpolation methods such as kriging (Buzzelli and Jerrett, 2004;Jerrett et al, 2001), or landuse regression (Crouse et al, 2009a;Jerrett et al, 2007). The advantage of this spatial modelling, as Kingham and Dorset (2011) have noted, is that it allows pollutants to be measured at a much finer scale, and at relatively low cost.…”

Assessment of Areal Average Air Quality Level over Irregular Areas: a Case Study of PM10 Exposure Estimation in Taipei (Taiwan)

“…Among them, the deterministic approaches such as nearest-neighbor method (NN) and inverse distance weighted method (IDW) are the most widely used methods (Hendryx et al, 2010;Hoek et al, 2001;Michelozzi et al, 2002;Sohel et al, 2010), in which the estimation results are derived from certain assumed functional relationship of geographical distances between the observation and estimation locations without considering the stochastic associations among the air quality measurements. The stochastic techniques, in particular kriging method, have been applied with increasing frequency in exposure assessment studies to address the spatial heterogeneity among the air quality data as well as the estimation uncertainty of predictions (Brauer et al, 2003;Brimicombe, 2000;Buzzelli and Jerrett, 2004;Hoek et al, 2001). Most spatial interpolators are originally developed for the estimations with geographical support of estimation and observation locations at point scale.…”