Linking socio-economic status, adverse health outcome, and environmental pollution information to develop a set of environmental justice indicators with three case study applications

Environmental justice (EJ) indicators, including a number of parameters ranging from pollutant concentrations to socio-economic status, were compiled for three case study locations that have a documented history of EJ issues. Instead of consolidating the 14 EJ indicators into a single metric, they are displayed separately to facilitate comparisons at four different spatial scales to allow characterization of local, city, county, and state environmental conditions. This methodology provides a broader assessment of EJ, conveyed more as a neighborhood story than as an associative relationship. Information and measurements for these EJ indicators were downloaded from national and local sources of publicly available, Web-based information. There are different motivations for conducting EJ assessments, but this approach provides an overview of the conditions for a given community so that a range of options can be considered to inform and support the EJ decision-making process.