Environmental Justice Spatial Analysis

Environmental justice spatial analysis tests whether environmentally hazardous facilities are located disproportionately near poor and minority communities by comparing the demographics of populations close to hazards with those farther away. The field grew out of Robert Bullard's foundational documentation in Dumping in Dixie that African American communities in the U.S. South systematically bore the burden of noxious land uses. A central methodological turning point came with Paul Mohai and Robin Saha's 2006 Demography article, which showed that the long-dominant 'unit-hazard coincidence' method, comparing only the host tract or zip code, badly understated disparities, and that distance-based methods reveal larger and more consistent inequities. The modern analysis therefore treats proximity explicitly, drawing buffers or distance bands around hazard sites and apportioning population within them. It then asks whether race and income predict who lives in the burdened zone, controlling for plausible confounders. The result is a spatially explicit test of the disparate-burden hypothesis at the heart of the environmental justice movement.