Environmental Racism, Digital Infrastructure, and the Geography of Exposure: Public Health in the Data-Driven Era
A special issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Health".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2026 | Viewed by 210
Special Issue Editors
Interests: chronic disease; electronic health; psychosocial
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure has revived long-standing questions about environmental justice, public health, and the unequal distribution of environmental risk. While data centers, cloud computing, and AI systems are often framed as novel technological developments, the social and spatial patterns that govern where these infrastructures are built—and who bears their health and environmental costs—are deeply historical. Environmental racism did not begin with algorithms. It emerged through decades of zoning decisions, industrial siting practices, regulatory neglect, and political choices that concentrated environmental hazards in racially and economically marginalized communities.
Rather than disrupting these patterns, the data-driven era has frequently reproduced and intensified them. From a life-cycle perspective, the environmental impact of digital infrastructure encompasses the entire chain, including resource extraction, manufacturing, energy consumption, and e-waste disposal. Large-scale digital infrastructure requires extraordinary amounts of electricity, water, and land and is increasingly sited in regions characterized by weak regulation, low land costs, and limited political power. These developments carry direct and indirect public health implications, including air and water pollution, energy insecurity, occupational exposures, and cumulative environmental burden.
This Special Issue examines digital and AI infrastructure as public health and environmental justice concerns, situating contemporary developments within longer historical trajectories and global contexts. While the United States serves as an anchoring case, this Special Issue explicitly invites comparative and global perspectives, including research from Africa, Latin America, South America, and Asia, where digital infrastructure development intersects with longstanding health and environmental inequities. Interdisciplinary, empirically grounded, and policy-relevant scholarship is welcome.
We look forward to receiving your contributions.
Dr. Charles R. Senteio
Prof. Dr. Mark Gregory Robson
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- environmental justice
- environmental racism
- digital infrastructure
- artificial intelligence
- public health inequities
- energy and water burden
- global health
- structural inequality
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