MethodologicalissuesinGIS-basedenvironmentaljustice.docVIP

Methodological Issues in GIS-Based Environmental Justice Research JEREMY L. MENNIS Department of Geography, The Pennsylvania State University, 302 Walker Building, University Park, PA 16802 Email: jmennis@gis.psu.edu Abstract. Research in environmental justice investigates whether certain unempowered segments of the population, typically minorities and/or the poor, bear a disproportionate burden of environmental risk. Geographic information systems (GIS) have been used to carry out ‘conventional’ statistical approaches to environmental justice research whereby the socioeconomic character of communities that host environmentally hazardous facilities are compared to non-host communities. However, methodological issues associated with the conventional approach, such as scale of analysis, continue to make GIS-based statistical assessments of evidence of environmental injustice problematic. GIS has the potential to mitigate many of these methodological problems through mapping/visualization, improved modeling of environmental risk, multi-scale analysis, and raster surface-based representations of population. The case study presented in this paper, concerning environmental injustice in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania region, demonstrates how raster GIS can facilitate the investigation of the relationship between the distribution of demographic character and the location of hazardous facilities across a variety of scales of analysis. This study finds that in the Philadelphia region there is a clear and predictable relationship between socioeconomic status and proximity to environmentally hazardous facilities that can be interpreted as evidence of environmental injustice. By using GIS to create improved representations of population character and environmental risk, environmental justice research can move beyond the simple statistical comparison of groups of areal units to the exploration of demographic patterns and their spatial relationship with the distribution o