Environmental Justice through Community-Policy Participatory Partnerships

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