LB 16-177 - A Canadian environmental justice screening tool for quantifying cumulative effects to environment, community, and health.

Background/Question/Methods:

Resource extraction and associated land uses impact both humans and the environment in complex ways, but the corresponding costs and benefits are not distributed equally across society. Environmental, community, and health impacts occur along multiple pathways involving feedback loops, synergistic effects, and non-linear dynamics, all of which compound the difficulty of their measurement and management. To address these challenges, we created an interactive geospatial app to integrate multiple indicators of environment, community, and health in an environmental justice framework. Building upon American environmental justice screening tools (e.g., EJSCREEN, CalEnviroScreen), ECHO Screen is designed to measure the cumulative impacts of resource extraction in multiple Canadian provinces. ECHO Screen was built using R Shiny and publicly available datasets.

The app includes indicators of environmental quality (e.g., species intactness, land use), community health (e.g., asthma prevalence, cancer prevalence), and social conditions (e.g., unemployment, income inequality). Indicators were standardized to allow each local geographic unit to be ranked against all other units in the province. Using these rankings, scores were calculated for each municipality representing the level of Environmental Burden and Social Vulnerability. The product of the Environmental Burden and Social Vulnerability scores were multiplied to create an Overall Score representing cumulative effects.

Results/Conclusions:

This poster focuses on results for the province of Alberta, whose landscape is predominantly rural, and includes numerous ecosystem types such as montane, prairie, and boreal forest. Pressures to these populations and ecosystems include oil and gas extraction, crop production, ranching, forestry, and mining. Standardized scores representing Environmental Burden, Social Vulnerability, and overall cumulative effects were produced for the 132 Local Geographic Areas in Alberta.

Results highlight municipalities where greater environmental pressures coincide with higher social vulnerability. The highest levels of environmental impacts were centered on the capital city Edmonton and the surrounding regions, owing mainly to intensity of land use and high concentrations of pollutants. Social/ health impacts tended to be greatest in remote communities in northern Alberta, rural Indigenous communities, and parts of city centres. The intersection of these two suggests the most impacted communities overall are located around the periphery of Edmonton’s suburbs.

A strength of this tool is that it allows stakeholders to explore the specific indicators driving negative impacts, but also to identify community assets that exist alongside the impacts. Additionally, the tool puts data from multiple disciplines in conversation, encouraging thinking and decision-making beyond sectoral silos.