Abstract:
Environmental justice reflects the equitable distribution of the burden of environmental hazards across various sociodemographic groups. The issue is important in environmental regulation, sit-ing of hazardous waste repositories, and prioritizing remediation of existing sources of exposure. We propose a statistical framework for assessing environmental justice. The framework includes a quantitative assessment of environmental equity based on the cumulative distribution of expo- sure within population subgroups linked to disease incidence through a dose-response function. This approach avoids arbitrary binary classifications of individuals solely as "exposed" or "un- exposed." We present a Bayesian inferential approach, implemented using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, that accounts for uncertainty in both exposure and response. We illustrate our method using data on leukemia deaths and exposure to toxic chemical releases in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.
Keywords:
environmental equity, hierarchical model, Markov chain Monte Carlo, regulation
tr45.pdf