A Database for Environmental Justice
Facilities that process fossil fuels pose a health risk to the people who live nearby. A new database, launched by Boston University’s Institute for Global Sustainability and School of Public Health, reveals that in the United States these plants are five times more likely to be located in areas predominantly populated by people of color.
Assistant Professor of Environmental Health Jonathan Buonocore and Assistant Professor of Epidemiology Mary Willis at the School of Public Health, who led this project, are core faculty at the Institute for Global Sustainability. They collected and organized disparate sources of federal information about the location of energy infrastructure into a first-of-its-kind database. According to Buonocore, this new database enables a comprehensive examination of how energy infrastructure impacts health.
This database allows advocates, decisionmakers, and academicians to investigate the correlation between the location of energy production facilities and human health and will inform conversations regarding infrastructure planning, environmental justice, and public health at a critical time for generations of residents. In East Boston, for example, neighbors fought for years the location of a substation near a playground and park (but suffered a recent setback when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled against them). And in nearby Chelsea, community activists oppose storage facilities for petroleum products, which in addition to being close to housing and recreational areas, sit dangerously close to Belle Isle Marsh Reservation, a fragile coastal wetland important to wildlife and the area’s ongoing resilience to storms. In the 1970s and 1980s, neighbors in Boston’s Mission Hill community (unsuccessfully) opposed construction of the Medical Area Total Energy Plant, which powers hospitals in the Longwood Medical Area as well as Harvard’s medical and public health schools.
These fights will continue, of course. But now, through the efforts of Buonocore and Willis, communities will have a great deal more of substantive, detailed information to work with, and the idea of environmental justice might not be just an idea but a reality.