Maryland EJSCREEN 4.0: Integration of Cumulative Impacts, Structural Racism and Discrimination, and Air Quality to Better Visualize and Assess Environmental Health Disparities

PROJECT SUMMARY. Across the state of Maryland, communities of color and low wealth populations are differentially burdened by environmental hazards and the cumulative impacts of chemical and non-chemical stressors and structural factors (including pathogenic infrastructure) that produce environmental health

disparities. This phenomenon is known as environmental injustice. To better identify and characterize environmental justice (EJ) communities, the Center for Community Engagement, Environmental Justice, and Health (CEEJH) has worked with its partners to develop Maryland Environmental Justice Screen (MD

EJSCREEN), an environmental justice screening and mapping (EJSM) tool. The current version of MD EJSCREEN (3.0) has features similar to other national and state-screening tools including CALENVIROSCREEN and USEPA EJSCREEN, and also some of the same gaps limitations. These gaps include inadequate or missing indicators to capture factors such as economic justice, energy burdens, social

progress, vulnerability, resilience, distributive justice, and assessment of cumulative impact over time. EJSM tools do not adequately account for the differential impacts of climate change on EJ communities. Additionally, these tools fail to acknowledge and characterize the effects of structural racism and discrimination (SRD) –

particularly environmental racism – on exposures and cumulative impacts. Other limitations include outdated, disaggregated data or data that exists at too coarse of a geographic level to identify communities experiencing cumulative impacts and to micro-target interventions. This particularly relates to air quality data, with infrequent

data updates leading to non-representative characterization of air quality conditions and thus inaccurate assessment of related cumulative impacts. Therefore, this MD EJSCREEN 4.0 proposal aims to close these gaps through the following specific aims: Specific Aim #1: Apply novel monitoring and modeling approaches

to assess inequities in exposure to air pollution (PM10, PM2.5, PM1, O3, NO2) and health outcomes. Specific Aim #2: Utilize advanced statistical analyses and iterative stakeholder engagement (focus groups and interviews) to better characterize and capture drivers of environmental injustice and cumulative impacts within

MD EJSCREEN. Specific Aim #3: Assess the association between drivers of environmental injustice, cumulative impacts, environmental health disparities through MD EJSCREEN 4.0 and MD EJSCREEN 3.0. This MD EJSCREEN 4.0 project is aligned with the NIEHS's strategic plan to advance innovative development

of new measures, and validate and adapt existing measures and approaches to address exposome-related factors that contribute to or exacerbate environmental health disparities. The proposed project is innovative because we will include the use of mixed methods approaches, real-time air quality data, SRD measures,

climate indicators, and advanced biostatistical and geostatistical approaches in building MD EJSCREEN 4.0. We expect that this updated tool to act as a model for other national and state-level EJSM tools.