“In August 2016, a historic flood resulting from 20 to 30 inches of rainfall over several days devastated a large area of southern Louisiana, causing over $10 billion in damages and 13 deaths. More than 30,000 people were rescued from floodwaters that damaged or destroyed more than 50,000 homes, 100,000 vehicles, and 20,000 businesses. In June 2016, torrential rainfall caused destructive flooding throughout many West Virginia towns, damaging thousands of homes and businesses and causing considerable loss of life. More than 1,500 roads and bridges were damaged or destroyed. The 2015–2016 El Niño poured 11 days of record-setting rainfall on Hawai‘i, causing severe urban flooding.” (67)
“Increases in baseline sea levels expose many more Gulf Coast refineries to flooding risk during extreme weather events. For example, given a Category 1 hurricane, a sea level rise of less than 1.6 feet (0.5 m)47 doubles the number of refineries in Texas and Louisiana vulnerable to flooding by 2100 under the lower scenario (RCP4.5).” (181)
“Many urban locations have experienced disruptive extreme events that have impacted the transportation network and led to societal and economic consequences. Louisiana experienced historic floods in 2016 that disrupted all modes of transportation and caused adverse impacts on major industries and businesses due to the halt of freight movement and employees’ inability to get to work. The 2016 floods that affected Texas from March to June resulted in major business disruption due to the loss of a major transportation corridor.147 In 2017, Hurricane Harvey affected population and freight mobility in Houston, Texas, when 23 ports were closed and over 700 roads were deemed impassable.” (498)
“Communities in Louisiana and New Jersey, for example, are already experiencing a host of negative environmental exposures coupled with extreme coastal and inland flooding.” (548)
“An example of the effects of rising sea levels can be found in Louisiana, which faces some of the highest land loss rates in the world. The ecosystems of the Mississippi River Delta provide at least $12–$47 billion (in 2017 dollars) in benefits to people each year.155 These benefits include hurricane storm protection, water supply, furs, habitat, climate stability, and waste treatment. However, between 1932 and 2016, Louisiana lost 2,006 square miles of land area (see Case Study “A Lesson Learned for Community Resettlement”),211 due in part to high rates of relative sea level rise” (775)
“The flood events in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 2016 and in South Carolina in 2015 provide real examples of how vulnerable inland and coastal communities are to extreme rainfall events.” (785)
“Hurricane Harvey was a Category 4 hurricane on the Saffir–Simpson scale when it made landfall on the central Texas coast near Rockport late in the evening of August 25, 2017. It then moved inland, stalled, and eventually moved back over the coastal Gulf of Mexico waters before making landfall a final time as a tropical storm several days later in southwestern Louisiana.” (992)
“The State of Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority’s 2017 Coastal Master Plan has more than 100 struc- tural and coastal restoration projects designed to provide benefits over the next decade and up to 50 years into the future.” (1320)
“Louisiana’s Comprehensive Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast has five broad objectives: reduce economic losses from flooding, promote sustainable coastal ecosystems, provide coastal habitats that support commerce and recreation, sustain the region’s unique cultural heritage, and contribute to the regional and national economy by promoting a viable working coast. The plan contains actions that advance all five objectives, reflecting a set of tradeoffs broadly acceptable to diverse communities in the face of hazards, including coastal subsidence (sinking land) and sea level rise.” (1323)
“Landfalls of storms usually accompanied by high tide and heavy rain result in long periods of rain and floods. The flood season in Central Vietnam lasts from June to October. Along the rivers between Quang Binh and Binh Thuan, the flood season lasts from September to December. The Central region has short and steep rivers with high debits. Dike systems in this region are relatively low or incomplete. 8-meter-high floods not only occur along the main streams but also spread over the floodplains (Le et al. 2012).” (43)
“Storms moved southward in recent years, though it is widely expected that because of the increasing temperature, the North will face more storms in the near future. Also the intensity of the storms is expected to increase, resulting in more wind and more intense precipitation (CCFSC 2001; IPCC 2007). In particular, more intense storms, representing in more threats to people’s lives, livelihoods, infrastructure, and agriculture, are forecasted.” (43)
“In 2009, storm Ketsana affected provinces along the Vietnamese Central coast, killing 163 people and causing over 600 million $USD of damage (CCSFC 2010)...In 2010, storms and other natural hazards killed or caused missing 173 people. 168 others were injured in October 2010 (GSO 2014)...In 2012, the South China Sea faced 12 storms, of which 4 directly affected Central coast…In 2013, Central Vietnam was hit directly by consecutive storms. The Wutip storm in September 2013 damaged over 1000 houses (Vietnam NCHMF 2013). Over 70,000 people in vulnerable areas were moved to shelters along the central coastline (Al Jazeera America, accessed November 22, 2013). In November 2013, the Haiyan storm forced over 800,000 people to evacuate. Storm Nari in November 2013 destroyed about 12,000 houses in 7 central provinces (The Weather Channel, accessed November 22, 2013)...In 2016, six tropical depressions and ten storms affected the Vietnamese Central coast. Six storms and one tropical depression directly impacted the land…In September 2017, Central Vietnam was hit by the Doksuri storm. Over 100,000 people were evacuated, 4 people died, and 10 were injured. The storm Doksuri caused heavy rains and floods all over the provinces in the Vietnamese Northern Central coast. Thousands of houses were damaged or destroyed. More than 50,000 houses in Ha Tinh, Quang Binh, Quang Tri, and Thua Thien Hue provinces were damaged. Quang Binh People’s Committee reported that about 200,000 houses were flooded or submerged, 5000 lost their roofs and 20 collapsed (updated news on Vietnamnet website, accessed on 15 September 2017).” (43-44)
“By 1996, over 2000 square kilometers of the Vietnamese coast was estimated to be at risk for annual floods. Flood damage is expected to worsen if the daily rainfall increases by 12–19%. …Drought intensified as a result of the increased variation in rainfall and evapora- tion (3% along the coast and 8% inland by 2070). The effect is triggered by rising temperatures (MONRE 2016)...Landslides in the Northern Central coast are often triggered by heavy rains and storms, resulting in large amounts of sliding material downhill. Riverbank erosion is widely spread in this region, in particular during the rainy season. The lower part of the rivers is severely affected. Coastal erosion goes up to 10 meters annually, which worsens with the sea level rise of the recent years.” (44)
“The vulnerability of agriculture in the districts depends on extreme climatic events. Most districts in the Ha Tinh, Quang Binh, and Quang Tri provinces have a high exposure because they suffer storms, floods, and drought. Districts with a high exposure index show also a high vulnerability. For example, the Cam Xuyen district (Ha Tinh province) with the highest exposure in the region (0.57) represents the highest vulnerability (0.56). This underlines that the agriculture in the region with traditional methods mainly depends on the weather conditions.” (45)
“Provinces of the Vietnamese Northern Central coast have a long coastline, many estuaries, lagoons, and bays (Le et al. 2012). Aquaculture is promoted and gradually became a leading economic sector. Shrimp, crab, seahorse, holothurians, and Gracilaria asiatica are the main products. Aquaculture farmers, including both fish and crustaceans, are water-dependent and influenced the quality of coastal resources. Higher temperatures and more droughts affect the yields. This is ongoing as the yields of the spring crops declined drastically during recent years (GSO 2014). Aquaculture along the Vietnamese Northern Central coast shows high vulnerability to climate change: the vulnerability index ranges between 0.33 and 0.73. The highest value (0.73) is for the Gio Linh (Quang Tri province), while the lowest value (0.33) applies to the Thach Ha district (Ha Tinh province). Aquaculture shows a high vulnerability in majority of the districts (25/28), while only three districts (Sam Son, Cua Lo, and Thach Ha) report a moderate vulnerability. The exposure and sensitivity index of aquaculture are the highest of all sectors considered. The districts in the Quang Tri and Thua Thien Hue provinces show the highest vulnerability because of its high sensitivity (Fig. 2.3).” (46) This is section 2.1.4.2: Vulnerability of Aquaculture
“The majority of economic zones locate near the shoreline. This makes them vulnerable to climate change hazards. However, industry is less affected as compared to agriculture, forestry, and aquaculture. The industrial zones resist the effects of natural disasters easier. This explains that the industry is moderately vulnerable to climate change: this relates to the moderate qualification of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptation capacity of most of the districts. The high vulnerability in seven districts is related with the high exposure. Industrial plants in new areas which do not offer solid constructions and modern equipment are more at risk from natural hazards than other areas.” (48)
“The Vietnamese Northern Central coast shows its uneven distribution of the population, which reflects a difference between the eastern coastal plains and the western hilly and mountainous areas (Le et al. 2012). Most of the population is located along the national road no. 1A and in the eastern coastal plain, which accounts for over 70% of the population and which is more dense than the national average. Hilly and mountainous areas in the West account for 60% of the area, but only 30% of the people live in this region. Consequently, the average density in the western moun- tains of the country is only about 10–50 people per square kilometer (GSO 2014)...Natural hazards damage habitats of locals in hilly and mountainous areas as well as coastal areas, while storms and flash floods impact both uplands and lowlands. These latter are affected by a combination of storm, floods, sea level rise, and coastal erosion. This explains why the region has a moderate to high vulnerability of the population to climatic change.” (49)
“Currently, the government invests in developing marine tourism, ecotourism, speleo-tourism, and heritage tourism along the Vietnamese Northern Central coast. However, climate change affects the cultural monuments. Also the water supply in the region is under stress; biodiversity will decrease, and the hot season is expected lasting longer. All this will have a significant impact on the assets and the revenue from tourism. Tourism experiences the lowest vulnerability as compared to the other sectors in the region due to its low exposure.” (51)
“The likely effects of climate changes are most tangible in this province [Ky-Anh coast]. They include: 1. The average temperature during the period 2000–2010 increased by 0.6 °C as compared to the period 1970–1980. 2. Extreme weather events: Unusual cold periods (the spring of 2009 was the cold- est of the last 40 years) alternate with heat waves (in July 2010, the province experienced during 10 consecutive days temperatures over 40 °C); storms are frequently accompanied by heavy rains (the 2010 flood lasted for more than 20 days). 3. Changes in the frequency, the timing, and the intensity of the tropical storms are part of the changing weather profile. While traditionally storms occurred during the period September–November, the storm season now extends from August to December. Floods occur from April to December. They become stronger and faster, with more peak events and more devastating impacts (IPONRE 2009)...In short, prolonged periods of high and low temperatures, drought, sea level rise, storms heavy rains, and (sudden) floods are considered the main weather drivers affecting the livelihood of these communities in coastal Ha Tinh. Consequently, Ha Tinh faces four main problems: 1. Changes in water supply: Drinking water supply and irrigation are critical all over the province. In 2010, 27% of the agricultural land was irrigated. The provincial policy goal is irrigating 70% of the fields. Also by 2010, 70% of the population had access to piped water. The daily per capita consumption ranges from 80 to 100 liters on average. The policy goal is supplying 100% of the urban and 80 to 90% of the rural population with safe drinking water (HTG 2013). The increasing pressure on the water supply hampers realizing these goals. 2. Changing land use and urbanization: By 2001, 10% of the land in Ha Tinh was urban area, while the remaining surface was rural. By 2010, the urban land cov- ered 15% of the province, while the rural area decreased to 85% (HTG 2013). The figures illustrate the conversion of agricultural and bare land into urban areas. Consequently, the area is also increasingly affected by the urban heat island effect. 3. Progressing shoreline erosion: Depending on the inclination of the beaches, Ha Tinh loses beaches at a rate of 0.2–15.0 meters per year. 4. Changing livelihoods: Both urbanization and the changing climate affect the way of life in Ha Tinh. Especially farmers, aquaculturists, and fishermen change their habits, adapting to the increasing storms. Urbanization is associated with changes in consumption lifestyles, the size of the families, the ways of commuting, the gender roles, and the time residents spent at home.” (64)
Emphases are mine:
“Problem areas were identified based on the results from the outfall drainage studies provided by Formosa. Thus, all the results in the OPCC rely on those studies, uncertainities associated with those studies, and the assumptions made for those studies, some of which may or may not be appropriate as I pointed out in Supplement #2 [Page 4]” (3)
“The proposed improvements assume that the conveyance capacity of the problem areas is increased 100%, which would be able to handle twice as much flow that it currently does. The results from the Drainage Study are not conclusive as to what storm event Formosa’s system currently is capable of conveying. The report does mention that the system is not capable of conveying the 2-year storm, and “sometimes” not even the 1-year storm event.” (3)
“A 45% contingency is applied to the OPCC due to the uncertainties associated with underground utilities, likelihood of existence of low road crossings and need to replace those, groundwater impacts, other unknowns, and additional costs associated with engineering, etc. 45% is reasonable and in line with industry practices in my experience, especially given the large amount of unknown information available.” (4)
“My opinion from my July 9, 2018 report that “there have been and are still pellets and/or plastic materials discharges above trace amounts through Outfall 001” is further supported by the deposition testimony of Lisa Vitale, as representative for Freese & Nichols, Inc, that she and her colleagues have seen floating white pellets or small plastic pieces in Lavaca Bay and in the area near outfall 001 as part of her work on the receiving water monitoring program for Formosa’s TPDES permit...Ms. Vitale also testified that she told John Hyak of Formosa about these sightings as well as has sent him water samples with the pellets about five or six times, including at least one time prior to 2010. This, along with the June 2010 EPA Report I cited in my July Report, demonstrates to me that Formosa was aware of problems related to discharges of plastics from its facility since at least in 2010.” (6)
“It is difficult to imagine any of these studies exerting as much of an impact on public discourse and policy as they did if they had not been closely connected to litigation, advocacy, and regulatory interest in addressing the emerging issue of environmental justice.” (6)
“EJ scholarship has uncovered environmental and health disparities based not only on race, class, and gender, but also on ethnicity, nationality, indigenous status, immigration and citizenship status, sexual orientation, age, and the intersections among these categories (Nyseth-Brehm & Pellow, 2014; Chakraborty, Collins, & Grineski, 2016; Gaard, 2018). Activists are increasingly appealing to these diverse axes of identity to mobilize broad-based organizing on environmental, healthcare, and immigration policies (Hestres & Nisbet, 2018).” (9)
“In Europe, EJ is often seen as an extension of protections for human rights, including rights of access to environmental information, participation in decision making, and access to the courts, which are enshrined in the United Nations Economic Convention for Europe’s1998 Aarhus Convention (Mason, 2010). In the global South, EJ issues are more often framed as matters of climate justice, participatory and sustainable development and conservation, indigenous and women’s rights, food and energy sovereignty, workplace safety and health, or the environmentalism of the poor (Carmin & Agyeman, 2011; Carruthers, 2008; Martinez-Alier, 2002; Reed & George, 2018; Walker, 2012).” (10)
“The goals of community-engaged scholarship are the generation, exchange and application of mutually beneficial and socially useful knowledge and practices developed through active partnerships between the academy and the community (Engagement Scholarship Consortium, 2018).” (11)
“A more inclusive scholarly process is crucial for strengthening marginalized groups’ rights to access and create knowledge that can help build their power to influence regulation, policy, and institutional practices. ES is scholarship “done with, rather than for or on, a community” (Furco, 2005, p. 10), and this is reason alone to prefer ES to other modes of inquiry into EJ.” (15)
“Ensuring that map making is a democratic process owned and controlled by community members requires that local people, not outside researchers, define the geographic or other boundaries over what counts as part of the “community.””(29)
“EJ research can also ground-truth existing regulatory data that is out-of-date or incomplete, especially emissions data that is reported by industry. In addition, ground-truthing can show how environmental standards for broad geographic areas can fail to protect EJ communities from pollution hot spots that exceed those standards.” (31)
“Data scientists can also use large data sets and algorithms to develop new measures of environmental and social inequities. For example, a team led by researchers at the University of Minnesota recently created a “pollution inequity” metric, which measures the difference between the environmental health damage caused and experienced by a group or individual...” (33)
“While real-time analysis of crowdsourced data can help track the immediate effects of environmental disasters, it may not be as useful for documenting long-term, cumulative toxic exposures typical of many EJ issues. … Much of that expertise is concentrated in corporate, government, and academic institutions, which may be unable or unwilling to collaborate with community-based EJ organizations. EJ researchers could play a valuable role in helping to foster big data literacy…” (33)
“EJ storytelling is a means of gathering testimonial evidence for research and organizing (Evans, 2002). Stories are a grassroots form of making meaning that is often more accessible and immediate in its impacts than academic research, building commitment to collective action (Newman, 2012). Storytelling lends itself to communicating complex causality in a form that can be more memorable than scientific data (Griffiths, 2007).” (34)
“Environmental justice (EJ) scholars and activists see communities’ ability to participate meaningfully in decisions that affect the local environment, including siting decisions for refineries, power plants, waste dumps, and the like, to be integral to the idea of EJ (Cole and Foster 2001; Schlosberg 2007). For some, this explicitly includes the notion of consent: participatory processes are a means through which community members can give their consent (or not) once they fully understand the scope and consequences of a proposal (Shrader-Frechette 2005, 2007).” (252)
“EJ advocates have called attention to siting practices that target communities of color because of their political margin- alization. In order to challenge the siting of hazardous facilities, commu- nities of color have also had to confront exclusionary decision-making processes characterized by unrepresentative local governments, monolingual proceedings, and reliance on technocratic risk assessments, to name a few (Cole and Foster 2001). As a result, one of the Principles of EJ adopted in 1991 by the People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit calls explicitly for justice in decision-making practices: ‘‘Environmental Justice demands the right to participate as equal partners at every level of decision-making.’’ (254)
“Seeing disclosure as an important element of informed consent provides ethical grounds to excoriate polluting industries for suppressing information, making misleading scientific claims, and intimidating scientists who wish to draw attention to the health risks they pose (see, e.g., Schrader-Frechette 2007, 39-75).” (255)
“Current discussions of procedural justice in the siting of environmentally hazardous facilities are far from na ̈ıve about the limitations of scientific knowledge. EJ advocates have not only criticized industry and government scientists for patently unethical practices like suppressing data (e.g., Shrader-Frechette 2007), they have pointed out the ways that scientific ways of knowing and technocratic modes of decision making can circumscribe community members’ ability to have a say in decisions that will affect their local environments (Guana 1998; Shrader-Frechette 1991); they have also asserted the need for community members’ local knowledge to be recognized as part of just decision-making procedures (Allen 2003; Fischer 2000).” (263)
“Not only is the history of environmental justice temporally deep, it is also geographically diverse and still expanding. Any account of environmental jus- tice will therefore remain incomplete, not least because it is still being written. Right now, across the world, thousands of communities are embroiled in the midst of ongoing toxic struggles. Environmental justice also belies its seemingly American past, and today it is increasingly clear that “the concept has travelled to different places” (Holifield et al. 2018, 2). Despite scholarly work on envi- ronmental justice remaining skewed toward American case studies (Reed and George 2011), many scholars have demonstrated how issues of environmental justice are truly global in nature (Walker 2009a; Armiero and Sedrez 2014; Guha 2014; Pellow 2018).” (6)
“A further body of environmental justice research places justice as a procedural concern. This form of environmental justice was born out of participatory democracy, and places the focus of justice squarely on access to decision making and accurate information upon which to base decisions (Yenneti and Day 2015). … This move from a distributional to a procedural logic of justice, which involves public hearings and access to reliable information, is predicated on the redistribution of power relations (Pellow 2018).” (8)
“Within the radical science movement tradition, citizen science emerged out of calls for the democratization of science and expertise to include perspectives from wider publics (Irwin 1995). For decades, scholars of science and technology studies (STS) have argued that scientific expertise is highly political and embed- ded in power relations (Irwin 1995; Epstein 1996; Fischer 2000; Frickel et al. 2010).” (11)
“...Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty (Bullard et al., 2007) revealed that communities of colour and poor communities were still being used as dumping grounds for all kinds of toxic contaminants. The authors discovered evidence that the clustering of environmental hazards, in addition to single sources of pollution, presented significant threats to communities of colour. Furthermore, the research showed that polluting industries frequently singled out communities of colour in siting decisions, countering the “minority move-in hypothesis”: the claim that people of colour voluntarily move into contaminated communities rather than being targeted in situ by dirty industries.” (122)
“Bullard (1990) has highlighted the problem of “Black Love Canals” throughout the United States, where issues of environmental injustice are deeply connected with environ- mental racism. For example, Bullard highlights the case of toxic DDT water contamination in the African American community of Triana, Alabama. In 1978, in the midst of the national media attention focused on Love Canal, residents in Triana raised complaints over ill-health effects and contaminated fish and waterfowl. Lawsuits in Triana against the Olin Corporation continued throughout the 1980s. Although the case is noted within environ- mental justice histories (see Taylor, 2014), it is not widely recognized or commemorated.” (126)
“Underpinning the slow, structural violence (see Galtung, 1969; Davies, 2019) of unequal and unjust toxic exposures is the problem of “expendability” … Pellow (2018) proposes that indispensability is a key pillar of critical environmental justice studies (alongside intersectionality, scale, and state power). This idea builds on the work of critical race and ethnic studies scholar John Marquez (2014) on “racial expendability” to argue that, within a white-dominated society, people of colour are typically viewed as expendable.” (127)
“National and international media headlines followed the Flint water crisis story as it unfolded, but, after the initial shock, Flint faded from media attention. It shifted from being a spectacular disaster to a case of slow violence. This paral- lels the dynamics of public memory surrounding many toxic disasters, struggles, and legacies.” (128)
"Far from being anti-science and anti-education, BP has successfully embedded itself at the heart of elite UK science and education policy and practice networks – in particular, networks focused on development and delivery of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. Rather than limiting itself to the narrow promotion of pro-petroleum rhetoric, BP has long seen its interests as being best served by the general promotion of pro-business practices and values throughout UK public education. Petro-pedagogy, in the case of BP at least, is best understood as a core component of a more extensive corporate education reform network that, for the past decade, has focused on promoting a neoliberal model of STEM education in schools" p. 475
"This brings us back to the argument of Eaton and Day (2019) that began this article: to tackle the crisis of climate change, we ‘need to dismantle the corporate power of the fossil fuel industries and their petro-pedagogy’ (15). Doing this, however, will require a far different model of STEM education: one that can help students ‘understand how manipulative politics, economic power and myth making PR are subverting public democratic will,’ and encourage ‘young people to apprentice as critical scientific policy analysts,’ and ‘create innovative counter-narratives to the old dysfunctional stories of intensifying carbon dependence’ (Elshof 2011, 15)." p.486
The "impact" of EJ studies when linked to advocacy
"It is difficult to imagine any of these studies exerting as much of an impact on public discourse and policy as they did if they had not been closely connected to litigation, advocacy, and regulatory interest in addressing the emerging issue of environmental justice."
Larger questions behind EJ struggles
"While “environmental justice” emerged as a concept in the United States in the 1980s, it addresses enduring global questions that long predate contemporary environmentalism. How should humans share the benefits and burdens of nature fairly among our contemporaries and with generations to come? In doing so, what are our obligations to the land, air, water, other species, and to the divine? Who should make such important decisions and how?"
EJ as a concept in global comparison
"Even if the term “environmental justice” is not as widely used outside the U.S., it has become a global concern, albeit one that is articulated differently around the world (Agyeman, Cole, Haluza-DeLay, & 9 O’Riley, 2009: Baehler, 2017; Walker & Bulkeley, 2006). In Europe, EJ is often seen as an extension of protections for human rights, including rights of access to environmental information, participation in decision making, and access to the courts, which are enshrined in the United Nations Economic Convention for Europe’s1998 Aarhus Convention (Mason, 2010). In the global South, EJ issues are more often framed as matters of climate justice, participatory and sustainable development and conservation, indigenous and women’s rights, food and energy sovereignty, workplace safety and health, or the environmentalism of the poor (Carmin & Agyeman, 2011; Carruthers, 2008; Martinez-Alier, 2002; Reed & George, 2018; Walker, 2012).
Civic Experts
"Karvonen and Brand (2014) describe four additional models of expertise relevant to sustainability that arose in recent decades, which can foster greater trust between EJ communities and experts. Foremost is the civic expert, who understands the need to enrich technical understanding with other forms of knowledge (including local, experiential, tacit, and indigenous understandings), and to share power over choices with the public, to arrive at better informed and more socially acceptable decisions (see also Stilgoe, Irwin, & Jones, 2006). These experts are adept at organizing authentic public participation in environmental (John, 1994; Shutkin, 2000), scientific (Jasanoff, 2011), and technological (Sclove, 1995) policy making and projects. Civic experts may be assisted by outreach experts, who provide technical and scientific information that can help boost communities’ capacities to participate in EJ decisions. Multidisciplinary experts may help by fostering collaboration among experts from different fields to tackle complex problems, and meta-experts may broker novel solutions that emerge and help ensure they are implemented in policy or practice. Within each of these models academics may play a range of roles in any given research project, such as planner, leader, catalyst, facilitator, teacher, designer, listener, observer, synthesizer, and reporter (O’Brien, 2001; Huntjens et al., 2014)."
Minimalist participatory approaches & ethnography
"At present, examples of the least participatory approaches that can still meet the definition of ES include research on communicating risks effectively and enhancing public understanding of science, when they involve tailoring information to communities based on surveys, focus groups, and other means of gauging their interests and needs. Ethnography can promote fuller participation by amplifying community members’ voices in scholarship and conducting “member checks” with participants to test researchers’ understandings against community interpretations (although researchers exert final control over analysis)."
Big Data and EJ research key points
While big data offer new possibilities for environmental justice research, they also present problems of voice, speed, and expertise (Mah, 2017). First, much institutionally-gathered big data is proprietary and inaccessible to community members and researchers, and unrepresentative of marginalized populations. Researchers need to consider how to practice transparency, given that many of these data are collected not by researchers but by third parties, with minimal or no approval from data subjects, who have little control over how these data are used and interpreted to make decisions that affect subjects. Second, there is the problem of speed. While real-time analysis of crowdsourced data can help track the immediate effects of environmental disasters, it may not be as useful for documenting long-term, cumulative toxic exposures typical of many EJ issues. Third, because big data are complex and challenging to analyze well, and can present novel problems of reliability (such as depending on anonymous contributors of crowdsourced data), they require considerable expertise to interpret. Much of that expertise is concentrated in corporate, government, and academic institutions, which may be unable or unwilling to collaborate with community-based EJ organizations. EJ researchers could play a valuable role in helping to foster big data literacy by working with communities to consider how these data are gathered, demystifying how algorithms analyze data, and so on (D’Ignazio & Bhargava, 2015)."
“Of all scholarly articles published in 2009 with the keyword “environmental justice,” almost half were authored by researchers based in the U.S., 20 percent were written by authors in the U.K., and 60 percent exclusively addressed U.S. cases (Reed & George, 2011). While this distribution in part reflects global scholars’ preference for other terms for EJ issues, it should also alert us to the need to extend the scholarly community beyond dominant Anglo-American academic institutions and to address EJ around the globe.” (11)
“Equitable scholarly collaboration with communities is one important corrective to a long history of academic and government research that has ignored, excluded, or actively harmed disempowered groups’ environments and health” (15)
“Reflexivity should act as a check on academic anxieties about scholarly identity and status, on professional and disciplinary insularity, and self-regard. Reflexivity reminds us that discipline building – increasing access to grants, recognition, and seats at the policy table – is a means to larger ends, not an end in itself. It pushes us to worry less about whether we are distinguishing ourselves from other fields and more about whether we are collaborating well with scholars from other disciplines and with community actors to address society’s most significant challenges and imagine their solutions” (16)