INTRODUCTION

These web pages are intended to provide a resource for those interested in environmental justice and equity particularly from a UK perspective. Whilst environmental justice has a comparatively long history of academic research, political campaigning and policy recognition in the US, extending back at least 15 years, on this side of the Atlantic we have seen equity issues begin to figure in environmental debates over only the past 3 or 4 years (writing in 2003). IESR have been active in researching and writing about environmental equity issues, working with other academics to develop a new area of work for UK environmental research.

The web pages provide information about our research as well as resources that can help introduce anyone interested to the US literature and activism, and to the growing body of work and documentation in the UK. If you are aware of anything we have missed we would be more than pleased to add it to the site. Contact Christine Dover c.j.dover@staffs.ac.uk or Jon Fairburn j.m.fairburn@staffs.ac.uk to do this.

Environmental Justice and the US Experience

Environmental justice, often used interchangeably with the term environmental equity, has been defined as the fair treatment of all people regardless of race, colour, national origin or income with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies.

Fair treatment means that no group of people, including racial, ethnic or a socioeconomic group, should bear a disproportionate share of the negative environmental consequences resulting from industrial, municipal and commercial operations or the execution of programmes and policies.

The concept of ‘environmental justice’, as it is currently understood, is largely the product of the activities of a network of community groups in the USA. These groups have resisted the siting of polluting factories and waste sites in predominantly black neighbourhoods and indigenous people’s reservations.

While possible adverse distribution of environmental impacts first became a concern in the United States in the 1980s, an accumulating mountain of research investigating the social and, in particular, racial distribution of various forms of environmental risk has built up the last 15 years. There are at least two different measures of environmental equity:

Proximity-based measures: proximity to facilities that pose environmental hazards

Risk-based measures: these go beyond the measure of distance to the site and incorporate other factors such as the probability of an accidental release of chemicals, toxicity, the level of exposure, the size of the area affected by the release and factors such as wind direction.

In 1990 an environmental equity workshop was established in the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to assess the evidence that environmental risks are not shared equally across populations. In 1994, President Clinton signed an executive Order 12898 ‘Federal Action to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations’, giving national priority to what had previously been a community-rooted movement. The Executive Order led to the creation of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC), formed to help insure that the Environmental Protection Agency would receive input from impacted communities and improve government accountability.

A variety of responses to the environmental justice problem in the US have been proposed. These include:

• Toxics use reduction (pollution prevention)
• Improved stakeholder participation in the public environmental decision-making process
• Improved access to environmental data and information
• Increased research on health risks from exposure to toxics
• Improved enforcement and compliance assurance through increased sensitivity to potential environmental justice problems in rule-making

Environmental Justice in the UK

In contrast, little attention has yet been given to indigenous environmental justice on this side of the Atlantic. In the UK, attempts to introduce social justice issues into domestic environmental politics have been low profile. Environmental justice has not reached the mainstream political agenda and only recently started to impinge on the practice of environmental institutions and regulatory bodies. The grassroots politics have not emerged in as strong and concerted a form and little research into risk distributions has taken place.

However, a report by Friends of the Earth in 1999, represented for the first time that a mainstream environmental group in the UK has directly addressed the social dimensions of exposure to environmental risks. The report showed that 662 of the sites coming within the Integrated Pollution Control (IPC) system in England and Wales are located in areas with household income of less that £15,000, whilst only 5 are in areas where average household income is above £30,000. This provided initial evidence of a far from equitable distribution of important point sources of pollution. Subsequent studies are beginning to suggest that significant inequalities, for example, in proximity to risky and polluting installations and exposure to air pollution also exist in the UK (see reference list).

Whilst the US experience of environmental justice has in part stimulated attention to risk and equity in the UK other drivers have also been important. These include 1) the strong social emphasis given to sustainable development agendas by the New Labour government focusing attention on the relationship between environmental equity and social exclusion 2) the evolving strategies of environmental pressure groups such as Friends of the Earth which have developed environmental justice as a major campaigning theme and 3) the 1998 Aarhus pan European convention on the environment, and associated principles of access to environmental information, public participation in decisions affecting the environment, and access to environmental justice. EU directives are expected in each of these areas.

A far broader environmental justice agenda has therefore emerged in the UK, encompassing distributive and procedural justice, international and intra-national risk distributions, intra and intergenerational issues and extensive matrices of environmental risk, environmental resource and social variables (including age, gender, class and ethnicity).

There is an important role for researchers to inform emerging policy with evidence, ideas and understanding and to analyse the fundamental principles of justice and equity as applied to environmental concerns.

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