Structural Racism as an Environmental Justice Issue: A Multilevel Analysis of the State Racism Index and Environmental Health Risk from Air Toxics

Communities of color and poor neighborhoods are disproportionately exposed to more air pollution—a pattern known as environmental injustices. Environmental injustices increase susceptibility to negative health outcomes among residents in affected communities. The structural mechanisms distributing environmental injustices in the USA are understudied. Bridging the literatures on the social determinants of health and environmental justice highlights the importance of the environmental conditions for health inequalities and sheds light on the institutional mechanisms driving environmental health inequalities. Employing a critical quantitative methods approach, we use data from an innovative state racism index to argue that systematic racialized inequalities in areas from housing to employment increase outdoor airborne environmental health risks in neighborhoods. Results of a multilevel analysis in over 65,000 census tracts demonstrate that tracts in states with higher levels of state-level Black–white gaps report greater environmental health risk exposure to outdoor air pollution. The state racism index explains four-to-ten percent of county- and state-level variation in carcinogenic risk and noncarcinogenic respiratory system risks from outdoor air toxics. The findings suggest that the disproportional exposure across communities is tied to systematic inequalities in environmental regulation and other structural elements such as housing and incarceration. Structural racism is an environmental justice issue.

Fear, Efficacy, and Environmental Health Risk Reporting: Complex Responses to Water Quality Test Results in Low-Income Communities

Reducing disease from unsafe drinking-water is a key environmental health objective in rural Sub-Saharan Africa, where water management is largely community-based. The effectiveness of environmental health risk reporting to motivate sustained behaviour change is contested but as efforts to increase rural drinking-water monitoring proceed, it is timely to ask how water quality information feedback can improve water safety management. Using cross-sectional (1457 households) and longitudinal (167 participants) surveys, semi-structured interviews (73 participants), and water quality monitoring (79 sites), we assess water safety perceptions and evaluate an information intervention through which Escherichia coli monitoring results were shared with water managers over a 1.5-year period in rural Kitui County, Kenya. We integrate the extended parallel process model and the precaution adoption process model to frame risk information processing and stages of behaviour change. We highlight that responses to risk communications are determined by the specificity, framing, and repetition of messaging and the self-efficacy of information recipients. Poverty threatscapes and gender norms hinder behaviour change, particularly at the household-level; however, test results can motivate supply-level managers to implement hazard control measures—with effectiveness and sustainability dependent on infrastructure, training, and ongoing resourcing. Our results have implications for rural development efforts and environmental risk reporting in low-income settings.

Assessment of health risks from environmental factors. 16 Years of collaboration between the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA), hygiene and environmental organizations in the Russian Federation: results and reflections

Environmental health risk assessment has a long history in both the United States and Russia. Risk assessment methods have arisen and developed to protect against the dangers of the forced use of tens of thousands of chemicals in the modern world. Because chemicals play such an important role, it is impossible to ban their use altogether, and the task of their safe use becomes more and more critical. With the solution of this problem, the creation of modern environmental legislation began, based on an assessment of the hazard or potential hazard associated with the impact of these substances on humans. Risk assessment has become the scientific basis for calculating exposure limits for many chemicals that pollute the environment. Since compliance with environmental legislation is costly to industry, methods have been developed. They are being improved on to quantify the burden of proof and the appropriateness of environmental quality regulation. Environmental Health Risk Assessment was first developed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA). Russia has accumulated a great deal of practical experience in assessing environmental risks and developing appropriate methodological recommendations. Thus, the basis was created for long-term cooperation between the two countries. This article summarizes the history of such collaboration, including a joint project to disseminate practical risk assessment in Ukraine.

Rethinking of Environmental Health Risks: A Systematic Approach of Physical–Social Health Vulnerability Assessment on Heavy-Metal Exposure through Soil and Vegetables

In the field of environmental health risk assessment and management research, heavy metals in soil are a constant focus, largely because of mining and metallurgical activities, and other manufacturing or producing. However, systematic vulnerability, and combined research of social and physical vulnerability of the crowd, have received less attention in the research literature of environmental health risk assessment. For this reason, tentative design modelling for comprehensive environmental health vulnerability, which includes the index of physical and social vulnerability, was conducted here. On the basis of experimental data of heavy-metal pollution in soil and vegetables, and population and societal survey data in Daye, China, the physical, social, and comprehensive environmental health vulnerabilities of the area were analyzed, with each village as an evaluation unit. First, the polluted and reference areas were selected. Random sampling sites were distributed in the farmland of the villages in these two areas, with two sampling sites per village. Then, 204 vegetable samples were directly collected from the farmland from which the soil samples had been collected, composed of seven kinds of vegetables: cowpea, water spinach, amaranth, sweet potato leaves, tomato, eggplant, and pepper. Moreover, 400 questionnaires were given to the local residents in these corresponding villages, and 389 valid responses were obtained. The results indicated that (1) the average physical vulnerability values of the population in the polluted and reference areas were 3.99 and 1.00, respectively; (2) the village of Weiwang (WW) had the highest physical vulnerability of 8.55; (3) vegetable intake is exposure that should be paid more attention, as it contributes more than 90% to physical vulnerability among the exposure pathways; (4) arsenic and cadmium should be the priority pollutants, with average physical vulnerability value contributions of 63.9% and 17.0%, respectively; (5) according to the social vulnerability assessment, the village of Luoqiao (LQ) had the highest social vulnerability (0.77); (6) for comprehensive environmental health vulnerability, five villages near mining activities and two villages far from mine-affected area had high physical and social vulnerability, and are the urgent areas for environmental risk management. In order to promote environmental risk management, it is necessary to prioritize identifying vulnerable populations in the village-scale dimension as an innovative discovery.

Embodied Burning, E-Waste Epidemiology, and Toxic Postcolonial Corporality

This chapter introduces the ways in which e-pyropolitics are embodied by exploring the illness narratives and bodily distress experiences of several copper burners. The author draws on ethnographic narratives to explore how Agbogbloshie workers narrate, understand, and refer to their own bodily distress to make sense of the toxic exposures and environmental health risks they face. In addition to exploring how toxic embodiment and experience break down or reconfigure demarcations of body and environment, the author highlights the ways in which toxicity and corporality become the site of laudable environmental health risk mitigation efforts that ironically fail to transform or reduce toxic corporality in an enduring postcolonial context. In this way, the author explores how a solutions-based intervention in Agbogbloshie overlooks the complexity and diversity of eco-corporeal relations in a tech metal extraction zone where bodies, toxins, and economies intersect.

Environmental Health Risk Evaluation Model for Coastal Chemical Industry

There are numerous uncertainties associated with environmental health risk assessment (EHRA), and it is unavoidable to apply the best models and information available to save human lives. The EHRA is a method for determining the type and likelihood of adverse health effects on people who are exposed to chemicals in the workplace. To address the environmental health problems caused by harmful gas leakage and water pollution generated by the coastal regional chemical industry, a novel EHRA model for the coastal chemical industry has been developed. The premise of the Gauss plume diffusion model is used to define the model’s parameters and the evaluation criterion for harmful gas concentration health risk. The EHRA model is evaluated against the leakage of harmful gases and consists of three steps. The first step is to identify the threat posed by the chemical industry in the coastal region; the second step is to quantify the risk; the third step is to develop a model for assessing water-related environmental health risk. The water-related environmental health assessor analyzes the pollutant variables and parameters of the assessment model to estimate the health risk caused by dangerous compounds in the water, using the assessment model of chemical carcinogen health risk and noncarcinogen health risk Type B. The experiments’ findings suggest that the model can effectively assess the dangers to human health from hazardous gases and heavy metals in the water bodies of chemical factories in coastal communities.

Seasonal Variation in Abundance, Distribution and Environmental Impacts of Geomicrobiological Communities in the Lower Calabar River Channel, Calabar, Nigeria

Microbes act as geochemical agents for the degradation of environmental contaminants hence their abundance and distribution influences ecological response to pollution stress in soils, sediments, and rivers systems and in environmental protection. In this paper seasonal variation in geomicrologicl abundance in the river water, sediments and adjoining soils have been assessed. The results indicate a higher microorganism count during the wet season. The presence of E. coli in 100ml of water implies that water is unsuitable for any domestic use without disinfection. The Faecal and Total Coliform counts also indicate that undesirable sources are contaminating the river and posing environmental health risk. However environmental self-remediation and possible absence of sources of the microorganisms was promoted during the wet season than the dry season.