Envirnmental Justice

Environmental Justice Beyond the Boundary of LTER in MaryLand

Dec. 2019

CPLN675

Mentor: Dana Tomlin

Urban forests and their role in buffering climate change and bringing Envirnmental Justice” are among the hot topics in recent years. The Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) with it’s significant efforts in understanding etropolitan Baltimore as an ecological system has made this city as one of the pioneer cities in U.S. in developing urban forests. In this study, I am going to evaluate the Envirnmental Justice ” within the boundary of LTER site to show which census tracts are mostly suffering from environmental justice and need serious actions for improving the quality of life for all the people.

Accessibility to Forest Hubs

Forest Hubs in this study, refers to green patches with area larger than 0.2 square mile. The Accessibility is related the proximity of census tracts to te Forest hubs which has been calculated through CLOSEST Spatial Join.

“Census Tracts” as Target Features and “Forest hubs” as the Join Features.

Social Criterion

Economic Criterion

Accessibility to Water Bodies

Accessibility to water refers to two types of water bodies:

1. with public accessibulity

2 . without public accessibility. Inorder to rank census tracts according to their proximity to water bodies,first the public accessible water bodies have been Geocodes on the map and then two beffer zones with radius 1 mile and 2 mile has been considered around and the census tracts have been ranked based on their intersection with buffers.

TIN Visualization from Social Vunerability

TIN visualization is another suitable method used to visualize the vulnerabl population distribution which the TIN contains elevation information.

The workflow below shows part of whole workfow diagram of the project which has been used for scoring the census tracts based on socio-economic condition.

Tin Render : Node Elevation of Vulnerable Population

TIN Visualization from Social Vunerability

Final Result : Aggregated Score

Calculate the final score for each census tracts with aggregating score and then zoom in the tracts with highest rate of Envirnmental Vulnerabilit .

7 tracts with highest risk of envirnmental injustice

In order to prioritze the high risk tracts based on their risk, their proximity to the TRI site has been analyzed through the Spatial Join.

Land Use and Envirnmental Modeling

ARC GIS + HECGEOHMS