ECHO Screen: A spatial assessment tool for quantifying cumulative effects to environment, community and health

Keywords: Climate justice, environmental justice, knowledge mobilization
Session Type: Virtual Poster Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 38

Abstract

Resource extraction and associated land uses impact both humans and the environment in complex ways, but the corresponding costs and benefits are not distributed equally across society. Environmental, community, and health (ECH) impacts occur along multiple pathways involving feedback loops, synergistic effects, and trade-offs, all of which compound the difficulty of their measurement and management. To address these challenges, we created an interactive geospatial app to integrate multiple indicators of ECH in an environmental justice/ health equity framework. Building upon American environmental justice screening tools (e.g., EJSCREEN), ECHO Screen is designed to measure the cumulative impacts of resource extraction in multiple Canadian provinces. ECHO Screen was built using R Shiny and publicly available datasets.

This poster focuses on results for the province of Alberta, whose landscape is predominantly rural, and includes numerous ecosystem types such as montane, prairie, and boreal forest. Pressures to these populations and ecosystems include oil and gas extraction, crop production, ranching, forestry, and mining.

Scores representing the overall level of environmental burden and social vulnerability were calculated for each municipality using indicators of environmental quality (e.g., air quality, species intactness), community health (e.g., asthma and cancer prevalences), and social conditions (e.g., unemployment, income inequality).

Results highlight municipalities where greater environmental pressures coincide with higher social vulnerability, while enabling a breakdown of specific indicators to better understand what drives those outcomes. This comprehensive tool enables communities, managers, and lawmakers to take notice of- and respond to- the influence of resource development on health and well-being.