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Special Issue "Environmental Justice and Sustainability"

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A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2021.

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Special Issue Editors

Prof. Troy D. Abel
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Guest Editor

Department of Environmental Studies, Huxley College of the Environment, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA 98225, USA
Interests: environmental politics; environmental policy; environmental gentrification; environmental governance; environmental justice

Prof. Debra J. Salazar
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Guest Editor

Department of Political Science, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA 98225, USA
Interests: environmental politics; social movements; statistics

Dr. Patrick D. Murphy
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

Department of Media Studies and Production, Klein College of Media and Communication, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA
Interests: global media; media and the environment; documentary media; media and social justice; ethnographic method; Latin American media and cultural theory

Jonah White, MS
E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA
Interests: urban development; gentrification; environmental politics and justice

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue invites critical cross-disciplinary examination of environmental justice’s dilemmas for sustainability from geographers, political scientists, sociologists, media and communication scholars, urban planners, and experts from other fields. Many portray sustainability as a harmonious nexus of ecology, economy, and equity popularized with a Venn diagram of three overlapping spheres. Others advocate a fashionable triple-bottom line for business. Urban leaders continue to pursue urban greening strategies to improve livability and redress inequities. However, a growing body of work sees more contradiction, dissonance, and discord than progress in many sustainability efforts. Some scholars even offer alternative and radical visions of environmental stewardship.

While metropolitan leaders embraced sustainability over the last three decades, urban geographies became more divided by race, class, and pollution. The political power asymmetries driving these patterns are also often obscured in sustainability scholarship. Increasingly, studies document how environmental projects ranging from environmental remediation to green space creation either fail to deliver benefits equitably or result in unintended and negative consequences for the most vulnerable populations. Yet, sustainability scholarship still pays too little attention to the ways sustainability policies and movements interact with socioeconomic, political, and historical processes in the production of more or less equitable cities.

In this Special Issue, we seek contributions examining how sustainability strategies intersect with or obscure racial inequalities, social hierarchies, environmental rights, housing segregation, and deindustrialization’s production of new spaces of advantage and disadvantage. We welcome a variety of theoretical perspectives, research methods, and case studies that help to uncover the contradictions of sustainability for environmental justice. We solicit contributions for this project that pay attention to questions of distributive justice, procedural justice, and social justice for sustainability.

Prof. Troy D. Abel
Prof. Debra J. Salazar
Prof. Patrick D. Murphy
Jonah White, MS
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

Environmental Justice
Critical Sustainabilities
Environmental Politics
Media and the Environment
Urban Development
Social Justice

Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

Open AccessArticle

Indigenous Environmental Justice and Sustainability: What Is Environmental Assimilation?

Stephen R. J. Tsuji

Sustainability 2021, 13(15), 8382; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13158382 - 27 Jul 2021

Viewed by 338

Abstract

Canada has a long history of assimilative efforts with respect to Indigenous peoples. Legal assimilation efforts occurred on two fronts: the voluntary and involuntary enfranchisement of First Nations people, and the dissolution of First Nations reserve lands. Cultural assimilation occurred through the residential school system, and the removal of Indigenous children from their homes by Canadian child welfare agencies in the “sixties scoop”. Another form of assimilation is through environmental assimilation. I define environmental assimilation as changes to the environment through development, to the extent whereby the environment can no longer support Indigenous cultural activities. Herein, I examine environmental assimilation in northern Ontario, Canada. The “taken-up” clause in Treaty No. 9, the “Exemption Orders” in the Far North Act, the “Except” stipulation in the Mining Amendment Act, and the unilateral streamlining of projects in the Green Energy Act and the COVID-19 Economic Recovery Act—these pieces of legislation pose threats to the environment and serve to facilitate the reality of contemporary environmental assimilation of First Nations. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Justice and Sustainability)

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Open AccessArticle

Thermal Inequity in Richmond, VA: The Effect of an Unjust Evolution of the Urban Landscape on Urban Heat Islands

and

Sustainability 2021, 13(3), 1511; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13031511 - 01 Feb 2021

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 993

Abstract

The urban heat island (UHI) effect is caused by intensive development practices in cities and the diminished presence of green space that results. The evolution of these phenomena has occurred over many decades. In many cities, historic zoning and redlining practices barred Black and minority groups from moving into predominately white areas and obtaining financial resources, a practice that still affects cities today, and has forced these already disadvantaged groups to live in some of the hottest areas. In this study, we used a new dataset on the spatial distribution of temperature during a heat wave in Richmond, Virginia to investigate potential associations between extreme heat and current and historical demographic, socioeconomic, and land use factors. We assessed these data at the census block level to determine if blocks with large differences in temperature also had significant variation in these covariates. The amount of canopy cover, percent impervious surface, and poverty level were all shown to be strong correlates of UHI when analyzed in conjunction with afternoon temperatures. We also found strong associations of historical policies and planning decisions with temperature using data from the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab’s “Mapping Inequality” project. Finally, the Church Hill area of the city provided an interesting case study due to recent data suggesting the area’s gentrification. Differences in demographics, socioeconomic factors, and UHI were observed between north and (more gentrified) south Church Hill. Both in Church Hill and in Richmond overall, our research found that areas occupied by people of low socioeconomic status or minority groups disproportionately experienced extreme heat and corresponding impacts on health and quality of life. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Justice and Sustainability)

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Open AccessArticle

Assessing Inequitable Urban Heat Islands and Air Pollution Disparities with Low-Cost Sensors in Richmond, Virginia

and

Sustainability 2020, 12(23), 10089; https://doi.org/10.3390/su122310089 - 03 Dec 2020

Viewed by 806

Abstract

Air pollution and the urban heat island effect are consistently linked to numerous respiratory and heat-related illnesses. Additionally, these stressors disproportionately impact low-income and historically marginalized communities due to their proximity to emissions sources, lack of access to green space, and exposure to other adverse environmental conditions. Here, we use relatively low-cost stationary sensors to analyze PM_2.5 and temperature data throughout the city of Richmond, Virginia, on the ten hottest days of 2019. For both hourly means within the ten hottest days of 2019 and daily means for the entire record for the year, the temperature was found to exhibit a positive correlation with PM_2.5. Analysis of hourly means on the ten hottest days yielded a diurnal pattern in which PM_2.5 levels peaked in the early morning and reached their minima in the mid-afternoon. Spatially, sites exhibiting higher temperatures consistently had higher PM_2.5 readings, with vulnerable communities in the east end and more intensely developed parts of the city experiencing significantly higher temperatures and PM_2.5 concentrations than the suburban neighborhoods in the west end. These findings suggest an uneven distribution of air pollution in Richmond during extreme heat events that are similar in pattern but less pronounced than the temperature differences during these events, although further investigation is required to verify the extent of this relationship. As other studies have found both of these environmental stressors to correlate with the distribution of green space and other land-use factors in cities, innovative and sustainable planning decisions are crucial to the mitigation of these issues of inequity going forward. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Justice and Sustainability)

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Open AccessArticle

Environmental Justice in the Case of the Chagos Marine Protected Area: Implications for International Social Work

Komalsingh Rambaree

Sustainability 2020, 12(20), 8349; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12208349 - 11 Oct 2020

Viewed by 721

Abstract

Between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the British government forcibly removed about 15,000 Chagossians from the Chagos Archipelago. Current legislation based on the declaration of the Chagos-Marine Protected Area (MPA) plays a crucial role in preventing the Chagossians from returning to their homeland. In this particular case study, the article aims to analyze discourses related to the establishment of the Chagos-MPA using an environmental justice framework, to consider the implications for international social work practice. Materials from court rulings, official government reports, and academic/journalist publications on the MPA, as well as from seven semi-structured interviews with key informants from three Chagossian communities based in Mauritius, Seychelles, and the United Kingdom were analyzed using ATLAS-ti 8.4 software. The main findings of the deductive critical discourse analysis are discussed concerning substantive, distributive, and procedural environmental justice for the Chagossian community (This term is used for referring different Chagossian communities from Mauritius, Seychelles, and the United Kingdom as a single homogenous group). This article calls for international social work interventions through transnational alliances between international organizations in challenging the socio-political forces that are having deleterious impacts upon the marginalized and disenfranchised populations and their biophysical environment. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Justice and Sustainability)

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Open AccessArticle

From XS to XL Urban Nature: Examining Access to Different Types of Green Space Using a ‘Just Sustainabilities’ Framework

Dong-ah Choi

Keunhyun Park

and

Alessandro Rigolon

Sustainability 2020, 12(17), 6998; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12176998 - 27 Aug 2020

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 1228

Abstract

Different types of urban green spaces provide diverse benefits for human health and environmental sustainability, but most studies on access to green space focus on neighborhood parks, with less work on smaller or larger green spaces. In this study, we examined sociodemographic differences in access to green spaces of different sizes for 14,385 census block groups in 12 U.S. cities using a ‘just sustainabilities’ framework. We classified green spaces into street-level greenery (XS), neighborhood parks (S–L; walking and cycling access), and large parks (XL; walking, cycling, and driving access). We ran spatial filtering models at the census block group level using different thresholds based on transportation modes. We uncovered a complex picture of inequality, with consistent injustices for XS green space, and fewer injustices for S–L and XL green space based on socioeconomic status and age, and some instances of just distributions for S–L and XL green space based on race/ethnicity. Our findings present a concerning picture for ‘just sustainabilities’: the green space type that is most often part of sustainability and climate adaptation strategies—street greenery—is unjustly distributed, likely as a result of structural racism in U.S. institutions. By examining multimodal access to green spaces of different sizes, this study helps urban greening professionals develop more just and sustainable strategies. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Justice and Sustainability)

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Open AccessArticle

Contested Dam Development in Iran: A Case Study of the Exercise of State Power over Local People

Elham Hoominfar

and

Claudia Radel

Sustainability 2020, 12(13), 5476; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12135476 - 07 Jul 2020

Viewed by 1137

Abstract

In this article, we address the interaction of the Iranian State, an agent of power, with affected village residents, as four dam projects are planned and implemented. Dams, recently positioned as a green energy source, are a central component to Iran’s national development strategies; yet historically their construction has been a source of significant conflict and resistance around the world. We focus on ten villages facing displacement or partial loss of lands at the time of the research, and we answer the question: During dam building and resettlement processes, how have residents experienced their role in decision making and the exercise of state power over them? Through a lens of political ecology, we engage with Lukes’ theory of power to interpret data from 18 focus group discussions and 20 in-depth interviews with residents, as well as from 10 interviews with local and state authorities. This case study illustrates how, from the perspectives of residents of rural communities, the Iranian State applies its power over them through multiple, simultaneous means. Coercion, non-decision making, and the withholding of information emerge from analysis as the primary successful mechanisms, while discursive consent-production emerges as largely unsuccessful. We demonstrate how lack of data or other information provision for natural resource development projects can be an important lever the state uses to exercise power, especially when combined with non-decision making. Although all Lukes’ dimensions of power apply to this case, non-decision making was most severe in its experienced effects, as residents suffered from uncertainty and an inability to move forward with individual plans. Our research provides insight into how conflicts over state-sponsored dam building can embody the contest between a sustainable development centered on justice/equity and one centered on economic growth. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Justice and Sustainability)

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