Manuals and Metrics

Environmental justice (EJ) seeks to minimize and equalize effects of environmental hazards among the entire community regardless of income, ethnicity or race. Issues of environmental justice often arise from geographic or procedural inequities. Geographic inequities occur when neighborhoods with high percentages of low-income residents, minority residents, and/or immigrant communities take more than their share of the worst environmental hazards, nuisance impacts, and resulting health problems from exposure to these hazards. Procedural inequities occur when the same neighborhoods face obstacles to meaningfully participate in the decision-making process for projects that directly affect their neighborhoods.

Many factors contribute to these geographic and procedural inequalities. These include a development pattern that concentrates undesirable or unhealthy land uses in certain areas, the placement of desirable public amenities outside of disadvantaged communities and limited or non-existing political influence among certain demographic groups. The following measures – focused on aspects of the built environment – are proposed to couple with the Populations Vulnerable to Displacement metric to measure environmental justice (or injustices as the case may be).

Environmental Justice is analyzed using five measures:

• Tree Canopy;
• Impervious Surface;
• Proximity to Heavy Industrial Uses (including extraction operations (i.e., quarries));
• Proximity to Major Transportation Infrastructure; and
• Floodplain.

Data: Grid cells that meet the environmental justice criteria for each of the 5 metrics are scored with a 1, while those that do not meet the criteria receive a 0. Scores are added to create a final Environmental Justice score. Environmental justice data sources include a tree canopy study (Mecklenburg County, 2016), impervious surfaces (Mecklenburg County, 2020), zoning (heavy industrial zoning districts, City of Charlotte, 2020), major transportation infrastructure (freeways, expressways, railroads and the airport, Mecklenburg County, 2020), and FEMA Existing 100 Year Floodplain (Mecklenburg County, 2020).