Groundbreaking nationwide study finds that people of color live in neighborhoods with more air pollution than whites

A press release from the University of Minnesota: A first-of-its-kind study by researchers at the University of Minnesota found that on average nationally, people of color are exposed to 38 percent higher levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) outdoor air pollution compared to white people.

Nitrogen dioxide comes from sources like vehicle exhaust and power plants. Breathing NO2 is linked to asthma symptoms and heart disease. The Environmental Protection Agency has listed it as one of the seven key air pollutants it monitors. The researchers studied NO2 levels in urban areas across the country and compared specific areas within the cities based on populations defined in the U.S. Census as “nonwhite” or “white.”

The health impacts from the difference in levels between whites and nonwhites found in the study are substantial. For example, researchers estimate that if nonwhites breathed the lower NO2 levels experienced by whites, it would prevent 7,000 deaths from heart disease alone among nonwhites each year.

The study entitled “National patterns in environmental injustice and inequality: Outdoor NO2 air pollution in the United States” was published in the April 15 issue of PLOS ONE, a leading peer-reviewed scientific journal.

“We were quite shocked to find such a large disparity between whites and nonwhites related to air pollution,” said Julian Marshall, a civil engineering associate professor in the University of Minnesota’s College of Science and Engineering and co-author of the study. “Our study provides a great baseline to track over time on important issues of environmental injustice and inequality in our country.”...

An aerial view of Harlem and the Harlem River, New York City, shot by Gryffindor, Wikimedia Commons,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

African women push for equality in land and resource rights

Elias Ntungwe Ngalame at the Thomson Reuters Foundation: ....[M]illions of female African farmers ... are disadvantaged by cultural practices and laws that deny them equal access to land. But African women’s rights activists are intensifying their efforts to push governments to speed up land reform processes and establish clear legislation securing women’s rights to own, access and control land and other natural resources.

According to Gregory Muluh, coordinator of the Grassfield Project, a government initiative assisting women farmers in Cameroon’s northwest, the country still has no law that protects land tenure for women.

“Even if people know that refusing women the right to own land is wrong, there is nowhere to complain, and women end up swallowing a bitter pill,” Muluh told Thomson Reuters Foundation during a visit to the Grassfield Project last year. “Instituting a legal provision to safeguard the rights of women to land ownership is imperative if we really want them to contribute fully to development.”

The African Women's Network for Community Management of Forests (REFACOF), an international NGO, believes only reforms that include legal safeguards giving women equal say in decisions made by customary and state authorities on managing land and forest resources will boost gender equality on the continent.

“We know that wherever land rights are being ignored, women are indisputably the most affected. Banding together and raising awareness of these issues is the first step toward ensuring all women’s rights are recognised,” Cécile Ndjebet, president of REFACOF, told Thomson Reuters Foundation....

A farmer at the women’s agricultural cooperative of Walikaly village in Siguiri Prefecture, Guinea. Shot by Laura Lartigue for USAID

Heat island risks and racial inequality

Inequality kills. From Bill M. Jesdale, Rachel Morello-Frosch, and Lara Cushing in Environmental Health Perspectives: In the United States, extreme heat events are responsible for about one in five natural hazard deaths (Borden and Cutter 2008). ... Furthermore, studies of extreme heat have shown large racial disparities in heat-related deaths (Greenberg et al. 1983; Jones et al. 1982; Kaiser et al. 2007; O’Neill et al. 2005; Schwartz 2005), although this is not universally the case (Ramlow and Kuller 1990; Weisskopf et al. 2002), and in at least one case, whites have been more affected than minority groups (Ellis et al. 1975). Land cover characteristics may contribute to these disparities (Uejio et al. 2011). Urban tree canopy is an important local mitigating factor for extreme heat (Hart and Sailor 2009; Oke et al. 1989), and impervious surfaces play a primary role in creating urban heat island effects (Oke 1982).

... Empirical evidence does not support the notion that cultural preferences explain observed disparities in tree cover (Martin et al. 2004; Zhang et al. 2007). Most existing research on racial disparities in tree canopy has been conducted within single metropolitan areas (Boone et al. 2010; Heynen et al. 2006; Landry and Chakraborty 2009; Lowry et al. 2012; Troy et al. 2007; Zhang et al. 2008). To our knowledge, no study has examined this issue nationally or assessed the role that residential segregation plays in driving distributions of urban tree coverage among racial/ethnic groups in the United States.

Impervious surfaces, such as asphalt and concrete, contribute to urban heat islands and surface temperatures via their high heat capacity, thermal conductivity, and often low reflectance of solar radiation (Asaeda et al. 1996; Stathopoulou et al. 2009). Relative to vegetation and soil, impervious surface also reduces evapo-transporative cooling. ... Several authors have also found that the extent of impervious surface is greater in neighborhoods with low socioeconomic status and a high proportion of minority residents, although these studies have been limited to a single U.S. city or state (Huang et al. 2011; Li and Weng 2007; Ogneva-Himmelberger et al. 2009).

...Ultimately we sought to elucidate how social inequalities shape disparities in heat risk–related land cover (HRRLC) characteristics. Toward this goal, we used racial residential segregation as a proxy for the degree to which a metropolitan area is characterized by historical and contemporary racial inequality and discrimination (e.g., Collins and Williams 1999). Political and socioeconomic forces have led to systemic racial and ethnic segregation, with important implications for community health (Morello-Frosch 2002; Morello-Frosch and Lopez 2006). Therefore, segregation is crucial to understanding social drivers of environmental health disparities (Gee and Payne-Sturges 2004; Morello-Frosch and Jesdale 2006) and, more directly, the potentially disproportionate health burdens of climate change on communities of color (Shonkoff et al. 2011)....

An aerial view of Philadelphia, shot by Payton Chung, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Equity takes center stage

Jaspreet Kindra in IRIN: As aid officials haggle over ways to reduce developing countries’ disasters risks, they are increasingly looking to target the inequalities that make some communities more vulnerable than others.

These inequalities fell under the spotlight at the recently concluded Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction in Geneva, a meeting that considered a successor to the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA), the global plan to make the world safer from natural hazards, which concludes in 2015. The new action plan, the Hyogo Framework for Action 2 (HFA2), is still under negotiation, and a key part of these talks has explored how to address inequality and discrimination.

There is “growing consensus” among NGO and UN agencies that tackling “common root causes - discrimination (social exclusion) on all sorts of bases (religion, caste, ethnicity, national origin, gender, age, etc.) - and unequal access to many kinds of resources, especially land grabs” has to be the core issue addressed by the post-2015 development agenda, noted disaster expert Ben Wisner told IRIN via email.

But Tom Mitchell, head of the climate change programme at the UK’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI), says addressing inequalities is not new; it was on the agenda when the HFA was being discussed in 2004. He says the fact that the issue is still alive reflects the failure of development strategies, such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), to eradicate these inequalities.

NGOs like Oxfam and ActionAid, which have advocated for these issues to take centre stage, have raised the topic again at the Global Platform.  “Countries with higher income inequality have populations that are more vulnerable to climate change, natural hazards and conflict,” Debbie Hillier, Oxfam’s humanitarian aid advisor, told IRIN. The poorest communities often live in fragile environments like river banks, and in housing constructed with cheap building materials. They lack insurance to cover losses....

An aerial view of a Nairobi slum, shot by John Storr, public domain

In Asia, wealth buys access to clean water

PhilStar (Philippines): Ninety-one percent of people living in Asia have improved access to clean water, a remarkable achievement over the last two decades in the world's most populous region. But its richest countries and wealthiest citizens likely have better water supplies and governments better prepared for natural disasters.

The assessments made by the Asian Development Bank in a study published Wednesday say countries in the region could be disproportionally affected by the potential impact of climate change if they did not rethink how they manage their water resources. Nearly half of the deaths caused by water-related disasters and 90 percent of people affected by such disasters from 1980 to 2006 lived in Asia, the report said.

Developed nations like Australia, Singapore, New Zealand and Japan top the list of nations best prepared to cope with floods, droughts, hurricanes, storm surges and landslides, while Nepal, Laos, Cambodia, Tajikistan, the Pacific nation of Vanuatu and Bangladesh are the least prepared.

No country in the Asia-Pacific region is a model for its management of water services and resources, according to the Manila-based lending and development institution, whose aim is cutting poverty. Thirty-eight developing countries have low levels of water security or have barely begun to improve, and only 11 have set up infrastructure and management systems…

An 1852 decorative map of Asia

China's rural wealth gap near 'danger' level

Bill Savadove in AFP: China's rural inequality is nearing "danger" levels as hundreds of millions of people shun farming for better paid city work, causing a widening wealth gap, a report said. The state-linked Centre for Chinese Rural Studies said inequality within rural areas was growing given the difference in incomes between those who farmed and those who flocked to cities as migrant workers.

Although the majority of migrant workers live in cities for most of the year, they are officially registered as rural residents. "The difference in rural residents' income is getting bigger and pressure on living expenses is increasing," the centre said in a statement reported in state media on Wednesday.

China's growing wealth gap is a major concern for authorities keen to avoid public discontent that could lead to social unrest in the rapidly developing country of 1.3 billion people.

The centre estimated the Gini coefficient -- a commonly used measure of inequality -- was 0.3949 for rural residents last year, nearing what it called the "danger" level of 0.40, the statement said. The Gini coefficient measure varies between 0, reflecting complete equality, and 1, which indicates complete inequality....

A street in a Chinese village in 2008, shot by Stougard, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Poor, minority residents in California face most health risks with climate change

Bernice Yeung in California Watch: Poor, urban and minority residents are most at risk for health problems linked to climate change, according to a new California Department of Public Health analysis of Los Angeles and Fresno counties.

The department examined social and environmental factors ranging from the rising sea level to public transportation access and found that African Americans and Latinos living in these counties are more likely to be exposed to health and safety risks related to poor air quality, heat waves, flooding and wildfires stemming from climate change.

“Clearly, climate change risks are not equal across the state or within individual counties,” according to the report .... “Identifying communities at greatest risk is a necessary step in efficiently employing limited resources to protect public health.”

...The study also found that there was a notable economic disparity between families living in the areas most vulnerable to climate change and those who didn't – the more at-risk families earned between 40 and 55 percent less each year than the least vulnerable families. Residents living downtown or in urban areas were also more vulnerable, the study said.

A western portion of Fresno County near Mendota also was found to be especially susceptible to climate change-related safety and health problems. Public health experts say these disparities in climate-related health risks can partially be explained by living conditions and a poor baseline status of health....

Los Angeles in heavy smog, 1973, US Environmental Protection Agency

Climate cycles are driving wars

Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory News: In the first study of its kind, researchers have linked a natural global climate cycle to periodic increases in warfare. The arrival of El Niño, which every three to seven years boosts temperatures and cuts rainfall, doubles the risk of civil wars across 90 affected tropical countries, and may help account for a fifth of worldwide conflicts during the past half-century, say the authors. The paper, written by an interdisciplinary team at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, appears in the current issue of the leading scientific journal Nature.

In recent years, historians and climatologists have built evidence that past societies suffered and fell due in connection with heat or droughts that damaged agriculture and shook governments. This is the first study to make the case for such destabilization in the present day, using statistics to link global weather observations and well-documented outbreaks of violence. The study does not blame specific wars on El Niño, nor does it directly address the issue of long-term climate change. However, it raises potent questions, as many scientists think natural weather cycles will become more extreme with warming climate, and some suggest ongoing chaos in places like Somalia are already being stoked by warming climate.

...The scientists tracked ENSO from 1950 to 2004 and correlated it with onsets of civil conflicts that killed more than 25 people in a given year. The data included 175 countries and 234 conflicts, over half of which each caused more than 1,000 battle-related deaths. For nations whose weather is controlled by ENSO, they found that during La Niña, the chance of civil war breaking out was about 3 percent; during El Niño, the chance doubled, to 6 percent. Countries not affected by the cycle remained at 2 percent no matter what. Overall, the team calculated that El Niño may have played a role in 21 percent of civil wars worldwide—and nearly 30 percent in those countries affected by El Niño.

...The authors say they do not know exactly why climate feeds conflict. “But if you have social inequality, people are poor, and there are underlying tensions, it seems possible that climate can deliver the knockout punch,” said Hsiang. When crops fail, people may take up a gun simply to make a living, he said. Kyle C. Meng, a sustainable-development Ph.D. candidate and the study’s other author, pointed out that social scientists have shown that individuals often become more aggressive when temperatures rise, but he said that whether that applies to whole societies is only speculative....

Polish soldiers on maneuvers in 2008, Łukasz Golowanow & Maciek Hypś, Konflikty.pl, Wikimedia Commons

Virtual water is unable to redress usage inequalities

Nadya Anscombe in Environmental Research Web: Similar to the idea of embodied carbon, the transfer of virtual water – the amount of water it takes to produce goods or a service – has been suggested as a way of redressing inequalities in water use. But, according to research published in Environmental Research Letters (ERL), virtual-water transfers between countries are unlikely to solve this issue because a nation's freshwater usage tends to be dominated by the agricultural industry.

David Seekell and his colleagues from the University of Virgina, US, looked at United Nations data on total renewable water resources, agricultural water footprint, industrial water footprint, population, reference evapotranspiration and arable land. They looked for inequality in water usage such as over-consumption, where for example 10% of the population uses 50% of the water or under-consumption, where for example 50% of the population uses 10% of the water. They found that overall, inequality in water usage is relatively minor when compared with the natural inequality imposed by geography and climate in the distribution of total renewable freshwater resources between nations. This is because water-rich countries do not fully exploit their renewable freshwater resources.

…The team found that the inequality in total water footprint minus the virtual-water footprint gives the same amount of inequality as the total water footprint. "This shows that the direction of current virtual-water transfers is insufficient to reduce inequalities," said Seekell. "Internal agricultural production contributes 76% to the overall water-use inequality among nations. Currently, not enough virtual water is transferred to completely overcome inequalities in internal water use because the contribution from internal agriculture is so large."…

USGS image of a water pocket in the Grand Wash at Capitol Reef

More unreason about water in California

John Gibler in Solve Climate News via Earth Island Journal: The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta used to be the region where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers would meet, pool for hundreds of square miles, and slowly drain into the San Francisco Bay and out to sea through the Golden Gate. Not anymore. The San Joaquin River is mostly diverted for irrigation before it can reach the Delta and the Sacramento is largely lifted out of the southern tip of the Delta and pumped down the San Joaquin Valley for irrigation.

Today, the Delta is a work of human engineering built over 150 years that consists of thousands of miles of levees, emaciated river flows, immense pumps, bromide and mercury contamination, endangered species, and below sea level “islands” housing communities and farms that would most likely be under water within hours of a major earthquake.

The Delta is the hub of California’s water engineering system and the current focal point of the state’s infamous water wars. Environmentalists and Delta communities want to reduce water exports. Irrigators in the San Joaquin and their strange bedfellows in the powerful Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which draws water pumped through the Delta, want to increase water exports. There is one thing all sides agree on: The Delta is a disaster waiting to explode.

…“We have a system where we try to deliver more water than can be reliably delivered. All the signals tell us that we have been exceeding the capacities of the system,” said Tina Swanson, executive director and chief scientist at the Bay Institute. “It is incontrovertible that we have to expect to export less water from the Delta than we have in the past; it is unsustainable. We’re going to have to learn to make do with less.”…

The Suisun Marsh Salinity Control Gates span the Montezuma Slough at the Roaring River intake detail. They operate like a heart valve, allowing flow in only one direction. In this picture, the three gates are open to allow the freshwater ebb tide from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to push the more saline Grizzly Bay water out of the slough. Photo by the Army Corps of Engineers

Pakistan's corrosive inequality

Commentary by Mustafa Qadri in the Guardian (UK): Contempt for human life is at the heart of Pakistan's miseries. Although the relationship between rich and poor is complex and far from monolithically asymmetrical, fundamental inequalities make progress difficult.

….As wild floods ravage the north west, our president is busy touring Europe in luxurious comfort. Staying back would have helped the assistance effort little, but it demonstrates poor political judgment. It also reflects the elite's flagrant indifference to human suffering. That is why in the heat of summer and widespread power outages last year our main opposition leader, the former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, decided to import a rare tiger that required a specially built, refrigerated enclosure.

To understand this strange opulence remember that our wealthiest live in a fantasy realm of mansions, servants and privilege derived mostly through nepotism. Superficially cosmopolitan – for their children typically study abroad and imitate foreign accents and customs – they are left with utter contempt for those who are less fortunate. Few show izzat, or respect, to the lowest who work in their kitchens, drive their cars or hawk trinkets to them in the markets. In a society based largely on honour and riven with resentment, it is a dangerous mix.

Resentment is a powerful political weapon in this country. Most of the so-called anti-Americanism in Pakistan is a sideshow used to enable the mass to vent its anger, admittedly at an empire that has done more than most to patronise our elites and feed their megalomania. Criticism of the west, Jews, or Hindus has become the catch-all that enables the oppressed to forget how casually brutal we have become to one another.

That does not mean humanity is dead in Pakistan. There is a lively philanthropy sector. Millions donated to charities helping those made homeless by the war in the Swat valley last year. And appeals for assistance to victims of this year's floods have already proliferated. Islamist organisations like the Lashkar-e-Tayaba linked Jamat-ud-Dawa, now operating under different names, have been quick to respond to the tragedy, too. The army has been at the forefront of humanitarian relief efforts….