Pollution,place, and premature death: evidence from a mid-sized city

ABSTRACT

Neighborhood life expectancy varies by as much as 10 years across the City of Louisville. In 2013, the Greater Louisville Project funded by local government, businesses, and foundations, argued these differences had little to do with environmental factors. The Greater Louisville Project (2013) study argued that these neighborhood differences could be attributed 40% to socio-economic factors (with a major emphasis on education), 10% to physical environment, 30% to health behaviors, and 20% to access to medical care. To test these claims, we construct our own model of neighborhood variation in years of potential life lost (YPLL) by adding two variables testing environmental degradation. We operationalise two separate measures of environmental contamination: proximity to EPA designated brownfield sites and proximity to chemical factories in an industrial park in the neighborhood known as “Rubbertown”. We conduct several regression analyses, which show a relationship between proximity to environmental contaminants and an increase in neighborhood YPLL. Our beta weights challenge the claims made by the Greater Louisville Project, which minimize the impact nearness to environmental contaminants has on reductions in life expectancy in Louisville neighborhoods.     

Human transformities in a global hierarchy: Emergy and scale in the production of people and culture

In emergy research, transformities are of fundamental importance. They are factors that are used to convert the inputs to a process into emergy. Once placed in emergy units, the inputs to any process can then be added together or compared. Furthermore, as a product of an emergy analysis, new transformities for outputs can be used in other analyses. By this process the collection of known transformities grows, and subsequent emergy analyses become more accurate. Human labor is often a critical input to an emergy analysis. Transformities for humans have only been roughly estimated based on education level, and should be judged as first approximations. This paper refines the existing values for human services, using similar techniques, but with some different assumptions. The result is a larger range of human transformities, expanded at both lower and upper ends that range from 7.53E4 to 7.53E13. There are many applications of this knowledge, from improving empirical studies to expositions of hierarchy that more reliably “locate” humans, economic production, and information within energy transformation hierarchies.     

灰色系统在安徽省地震区划及对策中的应用

本文在分析安徽省历史地震情况的基础上,结合与地震活动有关的因素,采用非均匀网格,用灰色聚类分析法进行地震危险性区划,最后用灰色决策理论,用求不等权和的方法将多目标决策转化为单目标决策,确定最佳方案和低烈度区的地震减灾对策。     

Income inequality and willingness to pay for environmental public goods

We study how the distribution of income among members of society, and income inequality in particular, affects social willingness to pay (WTP) for environmental public goods. We find that social WTP for environmental goods decreases (increases) with income inequality if and only if environmental goods and manufactured goods are substitutes (complements). We derive adjustment factors for benefit transfer to control for differences in income distributions between a study site and a policy site. For illustration, we quantify how social WTP for environmental public goods depends on the respective income distributions for empirical case studies in Sweden and the World at large. We find that the adjustment for income inequality can be substantial.     

Environmental policy and human capital inequality: A matter of life and death

This paper analyzes the economic implications of an environmental policy when we account for the life expectancy of heterogeneous agents. In a framework in which everyone suffers from pollution but health status also depends on individual human capital, we find that the economy may be stuck in a trap in which inequality rises steadily, especially when the initial pollution intensity of production is too high. We emphasize that such inequality is in the long run costly for the economy in terms of health and growth. Therefore, we study whether a tax on pollution associated with an investment in pollution abatement can be used to address this situation. We show that a stricter environmental policy may allow the economy to escape from the inequality trap while enhancing the long-term growth rate when the initial inequality in human capital is not too large.     

The forest frontier in the Global South: Climate change policies and the promise of development and equity

Halting forest loss and achieving sustainable development in an equitable manner require state, non-state actors, and entire societies in the Global North and South to tackle deeply established patterns of inequality and power relations embedded in forest frontiers. Forest and climate governance in the Global South can provide an avenue for the transformational change needed—yet, does it? We analyse the politics and power in four cases of mitigation, adaptation, and development arenas. We use a political economy lens to explore the transformations taking place when climate policy meets specific forest frontiers in the Global South, where international, national and local institutions, interests, ideas, and information are at play. We argue that lasting and equitable outcomes will require a strong discursive shift within dominant institutions and among policy actors to redress policies that place responsibilities and burdens on local people in the Global South, while benefits from deforestation and maladaptation are taken elsewhere. What is missing is a shared transformational objective and priority to keep forests standing among all those involved from afar in the major forest frontiers in the tropics.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13280-021-01602-1.     

基于Theil指数KAYA分解的中国碳排放差异性分析

为了量化2005至2010年中国各省区市之间碳排放差异性及其变化趋势,本文运用Theil指数KAYA分解方法进行研究,结果表明:全国人均碳排放差异逐年减小,能源强度是差异的主要影响因素,人均GDP是人均碳排放差异缩小的主要原因;东中西部和东北地区区域划分方法的组内差异大于组间差异,且中西部地区内部差异是造成全国差异的主要原因;相对"十一五"能源强度目标分解,"十二五"碳强度目标分解已考虑省市区差异,但其基本上根据人均GDP差异进行分组,且很大程度沿用了东中西部和东北地区区域划分。因此,建议在对各省区市分配减排指标时,考虑各地经济发展水平差异的同时兼顾产业结构和资源禀赋,并根据中西部地区内部排放差异将目标分解方案精细化     

Not so Black and White: environmental justice and cumulative impact assessments

A growing number of scientific studies in recent years have investigated disparate exposure to ecological hazards in American society. Working from an environmental justice perspective, this body of research consistently reveals that poor communities of color are most likely to bear a disproportionate burden of negative externalities. These studies utilize a wide range of research methodologies, including various indicators of ecological hazards (e.g., proximity to waste sites, industrial emissions, ambient air quality), but few, if any, utilize composite measures to approximate cumulative environmental impact. Consequently, the environmental justice (EJ) literature is characterized by a failure to effectively measure overall impact from an extensive range of ecological hazards. Limitations on available data make this a serious problem for present and future studies. We argue that cumulative measures of environmental impact can play an important role in furthering our understanding of environmental injustices in the United States. In this study of Massachusetts, we develop and implement such a cumulative measure of negative environmental impacts. By controlling for the density and severity of ecological hazardous sites and facilities within every community in the state, we demonstrate that exposure patterns take a generally linear distribution when analyzed by race and class. So, while our results reaffirm previous findings that low-income communities and communities of color bear significantly greater ecological burdens than predominantly White and more affluent communities, our findings also suggest that environmental injustices exist on a remarkably consistent continuum for nearly all communities. In other words, as the minority population and lower-income composition of a community increases, correspondingly, so does cumulative exposure to environmental hazards. In this respect, communities which are more racially mixed and of moderate income status that are not typically identified as meeting EJ criteria (in demographic terms) also face more significant ecological hazards. Thus, the strict bifurcation of communities into categories of Environmental Justice and Non-Environmental Justice is problematic, and poses a serious dilemma for policy makers, public health officials, and community activists. To overcome this challenge requires the adoption of a cumulative environmental justice impact assessment (CEJIA), which in addition to the demographic characteristics of a community, also takes into account the total environmental burden and related health impacts upon residents. Furthermore, through the adoption of the precautionary principle, source reduction, and alternative forms of “cleaner” production, environmental justice advocates must work for policies which reduce the environmental threat for the full range of communities, as well as their own.     

International inequality in CO2 emissions: A new factorial decomposition based on Kaya factors

In this paper, we analyze the determinants of inequality in the global distribution of CO₂ emissions across the regions considered by the International Energy Agency during the period 1990–2010. The inequality analysis is carried out using a factorial decomposition of the second Theil index of inequality. Specifically, based on Kaya factors, CO₂ emissions by active population are decomposed into four factors: carbon intensity of electricity production, electricity intensity of GDP, economic growth in terms of labour productivity and employment rate. The results show that global inequality in CO₂ emissions by active population declined by 22 percent between 1990 and 2010, where the economic growth in terms of labour productivity is the main item responsible for the whole inequality value. Then, a second decomposition by multiplying factors for analyzing the within- and the between-group inequality components is described. In relation to the study of inequality by population groups, it was found that the within-group inequality component had been the main contributor to the whole inequality during all the period. Finally, some economic policy implications are discussed.