Use of GIS for Environmental Equity Analysis: A Preliminary Investigation of Metropolitan Atlanta

A growing number of studies have applied geographic information systems (GIS) for analyzing the environmental equity issue. Most of the studies have employed data from hazardous waste or toxic facilities and U.S. Census of Population and Housing. Although the enthusiasm about environmental equity assessment using GIS is high within the GIS community, no consensus has been reached on how such an analysis should be made. Recent studies address several methodological issues related to data, scale, and analytical methods. This paper applies a GIS-based approach to assess the degree of inequity to toxic release site exposure and then investigates the hypothesis that environmental hazards have the inequitable impact on poor and minority communities in the Atlanta metropolitan area. This study utilized the spatial distribution of toxic release inventory (TRl) database and the demographic data at the census block group level. The preliminary results provide clear evidence of environmental inequity based on ethnicity and poverty in the Atlanta metropolitan area and show that ethnicity is the better predictor of distance to a TRl facility. Further, this research demonstrates that GIS is a very efficient tool for conducting environmental equity analysis through identifying the potential impact zones and then estimating the affected population by high resolution socio-economic data.