Disparities in health and socioeconomic well-being are a result of the cumulative impacts from multiple coinciding environmental, health and social stressors. Addressing cumulative impacts is seen as a crucial step toward environmental justice.
Using the case of the United States, this article -- published in the Regional Science and Urban Economics journal by Resources for the Future fellows -- compares different methods to operationalize the concept for real-world application.
It empirically demonstrates the extent to which non-White and low-income neighborhoods are subject to a wide array of burdens and how these burdens are reflected in national environmental justice indices and housing prices. It finds that non-White and low-income neighborhoods are correlated with measures of multiple environmental burdens and social stressors, but correlate to a lesser extent with natural disaster risk.