Paul Mohai’s research while affiliated with University of Michigan and other places

This is the first study to examine the existence of environmental inequality related to industrial facilities in Austria. Using distance-based methods, socioeconomic characteristics of inhabitants living in 1.0 km buffer zones around the 247 polluters registered in the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Registry are compared with those of inhabitants living elsewhere in Austria. While in Vienna no clear signs of environmental inequality can be found, in the rest of Austria people living in close vicinity to industrial sites are more often unemployed, have lower education levels and most notably, are twice as likely to be immigrants. Moreover, a logistic regression shows that the disparities concerning immigrants cannot solely be explained by other socioeconomic characteristics. The results of this study add to the evidentiary base concerning environmental justice disparities in Europe and suggests how application of distance-based methods can facilitate cross-national comparisons.

This chapter clarifies the substantial impact of environmental justice on scholarship and policy-making by addressing the core questions of this volume. It reviews the assumptions and contributions of the concept of environmental justice, which are argued to be numerous and influential. The scholarly idea and the social movement of the same name are not going to disappear: environmental justice is being used more than ever in the scholarly and policy literatures. The economic, socio-political and racial discrimination explanations for why environmental injustices exist drive different explanations for existing patterns, and divergent policy approaches for addressing the issue. As it heads to the end of its fourth decade, environmental justice research has a vast open agenda with great promise, both within national and local realms, and at the international level as well.

Communicating climate risks is crucial when engaging the public to support climate action planning and addressing climate justice. How does evidence-based communication influence local residents' risk perception and potential behavior change in support of climate planning? Built upon our previous study of Climate Justice maps illustrating high scores of both social and ecological vulnerability in Michigan's Huron River watershed, USA, a quasi-experiment was conducted to examine the effects of Climate Justice mapping intervention on residents' perceptions and preparedness for climate change associated hazards in Michigan. Two groups were compared: residents in Climate Justice areas with high social and ecological vulnerability scores in the watershed (n = 76) and residents in comparison areas in Michigan (n = 69). Measurements for risk perception include perceived exposure, sensitivity, and adaptability to hazards. Results indicate that risk information has a significant effect on perceived sensitivity and level of preparedness for future climate extremes among participants living in Climate Justice areas. Findings highlight the value of integrating scientific risk assessment information in risk communication to align calculated and perceived risks. This study suggests effective risk communication can influence local support of climate action plans and implementation of strategies that address climate justice and achieve social sustainability in local communities.

Children with consistent exposure to air pollution have increased asthma, chronic respiratory problems, and neurobehavioral dysfunction. However, many schools are located in close proximity to highways and industrial facilities which are key sources of air pollution to children. The goal of this study is to explore the association between the proximity from schools to highways and industrial facilities, and children’s school performance and health hazards. We measured the distances from 3,660 Michigan public schools to highways and industrial facilities, and linked these to the Michigan Educational Assessment Program test performance rate and the National Air Toxics Assessment’s respiratory and neurological hazards. We found that schools located closer to highways and industrial facilities had higher risks of respiratory and neurological diseases than those located farther away. We also found that schools located closer to major highways had a higher percentage of students failing to meet the state standards than the latter after controlling for the location of schools, student expenditure, school size, student–teacher ratio, and free lunch enrollment. In addition, a larger percentage of black, Hispanic, or economically disadvantaged children attended schools nearest to pollution emissions than white students.

Aconsiderable number of quantitative analyses have been conducted in the past several decades that demonstrate the existence of racial and socioeconomic disparities in the distribution of a wide variety of environmental hazards. The vast majority of these have been cross-sectional, snapshot studies employing data on hazardous facilities and population characteristics at only one point in time. Although some limited hypotheses can be tested with cross-sectional data, fully understanding how present-day disparities come about requires longitudinal analyses that examine the demographic characteristics of sites at the time of facility siting and track demographic changes after siting. Relatively few such studies exist and those that do exist have often led to confusing and contradictory findings. In this paper we review the theoretical arguments, methods, findings, and conclusions drawn from existing longitudinal environmental justice studies. Our goal is to make sense of this literature and to identify the direction future research should take in order to resolve confusion and arrive at a clearer understanding of the processes and contributory factors by which present-day racial and socioeconomic disparities in the distribution of environmental hazards have come about. Such understandings also serve as an important step in identifying appropriate and effective societal responses to ameliorate environmental disparities.

Although a large body of quantitative environmental justice research exists, only a handful of studies have examined the processes by which racial and socioeconomic disparities in the location of polluting industrial facilities can occur. These studies have had mixed results, we contend, principally because of methodological differences, that is, the use of the unit-hazard coincidence method as compared to distance-based methods. This study is the first national-level environmental justice study to conduct longitudinal analyses using distance-based methods. Our purposes are to: (1) determine whether disparate siting, post-siting demographic change, or a combination of the two created present-day disparities; (2) test related explanations; and (3) determine whether the application of distance-based methods helps resolve the inconsistent findings of previous research. We used a national database of commercial hazardous waste facilities sited from 1966 to 1995 and examined the demographic composition of host neighborhoods around the time of siting and demographic changes that occurred after siting. We found strong evidence of disparate siting for facilities sited in all time periods. Although we found some evidence of post-siting demographic changes, they were mostly a continuation of changes that occurred in the decade or two prior to siting, suggesting that neighborhood transition serves to attract noxious facilities rather than the facilities themselves attracting people of color and low income populations. Our findings help resolve inconsistencies among the longitudinal studies and builds on the evidence from other subnational studies that used distance-based methods. We conclude that racial discrimination and sociopolitical explanations (i.e., the proposition that siting decisions follow the 'path of least resistance') best explain present-day inequities.

To complement a recent flush of research on transnational environmental justice movements, we sought a deeper organizational history of what we understand as the contemporary environmental justice movement in the United States. We thus conducted in-depth interviews with 31 prominent environmental justice activists, scholars, and community leaders across the US. Today’s environmental justice groups have transitioned from specific local efforts to broader national and global mandates, and more sophisticated political, technological, and activist strategies. One of the most significant transformations has been the number of groups adopting formal legal status, and emerging as registered environmental justice organizations (REJOs) within complex partnerships. This article focuses on the emergence of REJOs, and describes the respondents’ views about the implications of this for more local grassroots groups. It reveals a central irony animating work across groups in today’s movement: legal formalization of many environmental justice organizations has made the movement increasingly internally differentiated, dynamic, and networked, even as the passage of actual national laws on environmental justice has proven elusive.

This article identifies the top 40 most influential environmental conflict cases in the US while also showcasing innovative mixed methods for more rigorous participatory collaborative work on environmental conflicts. University of Michigan students and faculty collaborated with Environmental Justice Organizations, Liabilities and Trade (EJOLT), a European Union mapping initiative, to identify US cases for their wider study. We began with an intensive scholarly and media literature review, combined with results from 31 semi-structured interviews with informants from a broad database of US environmental justice (EJ) departments, initiatives, and symposia. We then wrote short descriptions of 90 EJ conflict cases in US history, incorporating them into a detailed participatory online survey to garner expert and public input on which of them have been the most influential in shaping US popular opinion, policy, and political will on EJ issues. Seeking to provide a rigorous basis for the EJOLT mapping exercise, but also to instill an ethic of knowledge co-creation within the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s mechanisms for assessing EJ issues, we distributed the survey widely and posted it on the EPA's EJ Blog. It received over 1000 hits in the first two weeks. Our surveys remained active for about three weeks, for a total of 350 responses (101 from respondents who self-identified as EJ experts, and 249 from those identifying as members of the wider public). After eliminating incomplete or duplicate responses, we weighted to correct for that imbalance in the numbers, considering a total of 165 in our analysis. These responses comprise the list of 40 cases (unranked) we launched on the atlas in March 2014, and describe in this paper; the top five including multiple oil- or petroleum-based cases, one clean water case, one climate change case, and one confined animal feeding operation case.