Air inequality: When pollution is ‘racist’

Non-white Americans are breathing in worse air than their white counterparts, new research has found.

Published in the journal Nature Sustainability, the study suggests that California’s environmental regulations systemically protect white neighbourhoods and non-Hispanic people within the state from exposure to air pollution.

Research carried out by the University of California San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy used data from 2020, when the state issued shelter-in-place orders in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The researchers compared patterns in air pollution both before and during the shutdown, using information from public and privately-owned air monitor networks, as well as satellite measurements of gas nitrogen dioxide, which is a pollutant.

After various factors were considered, the study found that during the period when the ‘in-person’ economy was shut down, neigbourhoods with substantial Hispanic and Asian populations saw disproportionately higher declines in air pollution – meaning the inverse is true when things are normal.

Meanwhile, Black communities did not experience a similar drop in air pollution during the shutdown. However, Black residents in California were exposed to worse air quality compared to whites only when essential businesses were operating during the shutdown.

The study also finds that low-income communities are routinely exposed to more pollution when the economy is functioning as normal and that these neighbourhoods also witnessed cleaner air during the shutdown.

“The COVID shutdown gave us a window into what pollution patterns look like when most of the economy is turned off,” said Jennifer Burney, the Marshall Saunders Chancellor’s Endowed Chair in Global Climate Policy and Research at UC San Diego. “[It] showed that though there is some small overlap, income does not explain the racial and ethnic bias in how our economy creates and distributes pollution.”

Burney said that income only explains around 15 percent of the decrease in air pollution experienced by Asian and Hispanic communities during the shutdown.

“This may be surprising to many because people tend to conflate income and race, both because systemic discrimination is a hard thing to face and because we have accepted that we live in a world where individuals can ‘buy’ cleaner air through higher housing prices in less polluted areas.”

Burney and the research team behind the study see this as evidence of environmental policy failure in California, where transportation, energy, construction and other emission-producing industries are subject to strict regulation.

“One would think that in a state with strong environmental policies, where we track what is being emitted where, that our regulatory system might do a good job of protecting everyone equally,” Burney said.

“But this is really strong evidence of systemic bias. Pollution sources from everything that was shut down, transportation, businesses, restaurants, etc. all add up during business-as-usual conditions. Thus, the total system is tipped, exposing racial and ethnic minorities to more pollution.”

While the study was limited to California, researchers believe that air inequality standards between ethnicities are likely to apply to other states.

Among the policy recommendations offered are those that target transportation emissions, which were the largest pollution source affected by the pandemic.

Additionally, since air pollution disparities experienced by racial and ethnic minorities were not only explainable by income alone, then environmental strategies based on income are unlikely to achieve better equity outcomes.

“There is no clear, quantitative equity criterion applied in regulatory analysis to safeguard against environmental racism,” said study co-author Katharine Ricke, an assistant professor at UC San Diego and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Researchers also suggest that including minority communities in the planning process when there are proposed changes to their respective environments is critical.

Co-author Pascal Polonik, a PhD candidate at Scripps Oceanography, added that “improving access to information, such as data from the crowd-sourced sensors that were utilized in the study, could help communities be part of informed decision-making.”

“Unfortunately, these sensors tend to be located in the places least likely to be impacted by unjust pollution exposure.”