Climate

A new study by Northeastern University shows that environmental racism and injustice are still urgent problems. Of the 30 most environmentally overburdened communities in Massachusetts, 24 are communities of color. The top 30 list includes all of Boston's neighborhoods except one.

Tags: Climate

Hurricane Katrina cast national attention on the environmental hardships inflicted upon poorer neighborhoods and people of color by the disaster in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region. However a new report demonstrates that profound environmental injustices also exist in the Bay State. Environmentally hazardous waste sites and polluting industrial facilities are disproportionately located in communities of color and lower-income communities according to “Unequal Exposure to Ecological Hazards 2005: Environmental Injustices in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts” a new report by Daniel R. Faber associate professor of Sociology Northeastern University and Eric J. Krieg associate professor of Sociology Johnson State College.

“An analysis of 362 communities throughout the Commonwealth of Massachusetts reveals that these populations live each day with substantially greater risk of exposure to environmental health hazards” said Project Director Daniel Faber. “And these disparities have worsened in recent years. A person living in a community of color is now thirty-nine times more likely to live in one of the thirty most environmentally-burdened communities in the state.”

Faber notes that the report is the first to provide a method for ranking the environmental burden of communities in the state utilizing the 2000 Census as well as the first to measure cumulative exposure to environmental hazards of all kinds in Massachusetts.

Key findings

“Clearly not all Massachusetts residents enjoy equal access to a clean environment. Communities most heavily burdened with environmentally hazardous industrial facilities and sites are overwhelmingly minority and lower-income. Governmental action is urgently required to address these disparities” says Dr. Daniel Faber. Read the 2005 Unequal Exposure to Ecological Hazards report.

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