Proximity-to-Hazard Dashboard: Visualizing Environmental Justice Conditions of Overburdened CommunitiesUntitled Item

This article describes the Proximity-to-Hazard Dashboard (PHD) developed by a multidisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago. The team used an interative community-based participatory design (CBPD) approach to identify environmental justice concerns among communities in the southwest area of Chicago and formulate the visualization interface.

Drawing from these insights, the PHD proposes a new approach based on ‘proximity to a location’ and the notion of ‘cumulative burden’ to assess the impact of an additional polluting source on local communities. After reviewing existing environmental justice dashboards released by state governments, the article describes how the PHD was developed and its unique characteristics. The PHD makes two substantial advancements to current EJ GIS applications. First, it proposes a localized decision support tool targeted to local communities and policymakers by providing an easily accessible representation of the cumulative environmental burden (EB). Second, it integrates a location proximity approach with socioeconomic disparities (SD) information with an emphasis on the unequal distribution of EB on a sensitive population, namely schoolchildren.

The current PHD interface is selected to provide an easy-to-replicate tool for other urban centers aiming to perform environmental justice interventions and provide access to environmental justice data and visualizations to historically marginalized communities.