Retooling CalEnviroScreen: Cumulative Pollution Burden and Race-Based Environmental Health Vulnerabilities in California

Abstract

The California Community Environmental Health Screening Tool (CalEnviroScreen) advances research and policy pertaining to environmental health vulnerability. However, CalEnviroScreen departs from its historical foundations and comparable screening tools by no longer considering racial status as an indicator of environmental health vulnerability and predictor of cumulative pollution burden. This study used conceptual frameworks and analytical techniques from environmental health and inequality literature to address the limitations of CalEnviroScreen, especially its inattention to race-based environmental health vulnerabilities. It developed an adjusted measure of cumulative pollution burden from the CalEnviroScreen 2.0 data that facilitates multivariate analyses of the effect of neighborhood racial composition on cumulative pollution burden, net of other indicators of population vulnerability, traffic density, industrial zoning, and local and regional clustering of pollution burden. Principal component analyses produced three new measures of population vulnerability, including Latina/o cumulative disadvantage that represents the spatial concentration of Latinas/os, economic disadvantage, limited English-speaking ability, and health vulnerability. Spatial error regression analyses demonstrated that concentrations of Latinas/os, followed by Latina/o cumulative disadvantage, are the strongest demographic determinants of adjusted cumulative pollution burden. Findings have implications for research and policy pertaining to cumulative impacts and race-based environmental health vulnerabilities within and beyond California.

Misrecognition in a Sustainability Capital: Race, Representation, and Transportation Survey Response Rates in the Portland Metropolitan Area

“…Survey administrators and even some transportation planners may not have much ability or authority to intervene into the unsustainable and inequitable distribution of transportation amenities in the Portland area. However, transportation surveyors and planners should be aware of the consequences of their seemingly race-neutral actions [2], and the important sociological insight that racial categories, identities, processes, and outcomes within and beyond the Portland, Oregon transportation sector are not reducible to social class [1,2,10,11,28,29,48,[50][51][52][53]55,56,[58][59][60][61][62]68,69,72,81,83]. Indeed, racial misrecognition in the 2011 OHAS occurred even when the samples were weighted to make them more representative of socioeconomic factors in the metropolis.…”

“…Coefficient of variation thresholds are under the discretion of the researcher [67]. We used the CV threshold of 0.50 to achieve a medium-reliability level [68,69] and to minimize measurement error from the ACS and small analytical samples that might result from using more stringent CV thresholds [31,67].…”

“…where y represented the logged percent of OHAS household respondents, α was the constant, β was the coefficient for the k number of X explanatory and control variables, λ was the spatial autoregressive coefficient, W was the spatial weights matrix, e was the OLS model random error term, and u was the spatially independent error term [68,77,78]. After considerable experimentation, we found that a third-order queen adjacency spatial weights matrix successfully accounted for spatial dependence in the spatial error model.…”

Reuse Choice, Flood Risk and Resilience, and Characteristics of Counties with Brownfield Cleanups

“…Operating at different spatial scales, location is often synonymous with race and Hispanic ethnicity that have been associated with disproportionate hazard exposures and spatial inequities in amenities and opportunities (waste transfer stations, parks and recreational areas) and may exhibit its effect in an interaction with other location variables [67,68].…”

“…Community environmental stressors are additive, cumulative environmental stressors of known and suspected abandoned brownfields, hazardous-waste Superfund sites, transportation, storage and disposal facilities, leaking underground storage tanks, and toxic release reporting facilities [67][68][69][70].…”