Environmental Justice through Community-Policy Participatory Partnerships

Geographical information systems (GIS) are often used to design environ-
mental justice (EJ) policy interventions. Leveraging GIS and other graphics,
overburdened EJ communities can learn from maps that geographically link
environmental burden (EB) and social disparity (SD) data. Visually representing
EB and SD data concretizes the unjust distributions of environmental and
broader inequitable societal policies. These maps can be used to efficaciously
assess EJ disparities created by such policies through exploring socioeconomic
characteristics with local communities. Given the great variation in how GIS
EJ applications measure and visualize EB and SD, we present a communi-
ty-based participatory design (CBPD) lens to collaboratively work across
overburdened communities and support making EJ data accessible to all
stakeholders. Our location proximity approach is a powerful way to assess
overburdened EJ communities because it relies on user-predefined boundaries,
and it doesn’t use a single fixed unit of reference to prioritize areas of inter-
vention. Moreover, most areal unit applications use ordinal measures, such as
percentiles, and multidimensional indexes, which are intelligible to under-
stand by many residents. Leveraging a community-based participatory design
methodology, we present our novel Proximity to Hazards Dashboard (PHD)
that includes data on asphalt plants and industrial corridors, hazards often
missing from state-level dashboards but very relevant for city policymaking, as
well as more traditionally used environmental hazard sources. The use of the
tool by policymakers and community members suggests that EJ categorization
should focus less on procedural benchmarks and more on systemic change for
policy impacts in ways that sustain the participatory nature of our approach.