Assessing environmental justice through potential exposure to air pollution: A socio-spatial analysis in Madrid and Barcelona, Spain
| Autor: | Pedro Martínez-Suárez, Antonio Palacios-García, Rosa Cañada-Torrecilla, Antonio Moreno-Jiménez, María Jesús Vidal-Domínguez |
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| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: |
Pollution
Sustainable development Environmental justice education.field_of_study Sociology and Political Science media_common.quotation_subject 05 social sciences Population 0507 social and economic geography Air pollution 010501 environmental sciences medicine.disease_cause 01 natural sciences Injustice Geography Scale (social sciences) medicine Environmental impact assessment education 050703 geography Environmental planning 0105 earth and related environmental sciences media_common |
| Zdroj: | Geoforum. 69:117-131 |
| ISSN: | 0016-7185 |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.12.008 |
| Popis: | The concept of environmental justice (EJ) has recently gained currency, both as a factor for and a goal of sustainable development. Its implementation in practice implies establishing current environmental injustice patterns and analysing planning policies, with the aim to reduce socio-demographic inequalities in the negative environmental impact borne by different population groups. This paper proposes a method to assess differential exposure to excessive pollution levels by socio-demographic groups in intra-urban spaces. The approach developed in this paper is based upon GIS and quantitative spatial analysis techniques. It incorporates the idea of an ‘environmental justice weighting scale’ for policy-making, using normative pollution thresholds to measure inequalities more objectively and consistently. Spain’s two largest cities, Madrid and Barcelona, have been chosen as case-studies, taking nitrogen dioxide as the pollutant, and the geographic distribution of six vulnerable population groups (children, elderly people and international immigrants) in the year 2010. The results reveal that a large part of these groups suffer exposure to air pollution exceeding the maximum permitted levels disproportionately, which would imply a case of environmental injustice. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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