Acting on the Answers: How Exposure Science Can Address the Cumulative Impacts of Community Lived Experience
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Efforts to characterize cumulative impacts have been substantial, but the time has come to explore the next generation of cumulative impact assessments and applications, approaches designed to remedy the past, heal the present, and plan for the future – approaches designed for solutions. Exposure scientists are uniquely suited to address these challenges, connecting a range of stakeholders to research and applications that inform solutions across sectors and impacts, resulting in demonstrable improvements to the physical and mental health of communities.
A community’s physical and mental health relates strongly to the impacts from accumulated environmental, social, and economic conditions to which its residents are exposed. These can range from: air, water, soil, noise, and light pollution; food access, crime and safety, and political disenfranchisement; to transportation, infrastructure, land use, and employment. These conditions occur not only in certain communities more than others, but also on each resident throughout their lifetime, representing a series of acute and chronic exposures that accumulate and ultimately manifest as health outcomes including asthma, cancer, obesity, stress and allostatic load, premature mortality, and a host of others.
While the definition of cumulative impacts may vary between researchers, policy makers, and the public, the intent is the same: a person’s health is dictated in large part by their entire lived experience; the accumulated response to exposures– positive and negative – from environmental, social, and economic sources. To date, much work on cumulative impacts has focused on characterization, such as by combining environmental and demographic variables (e.g., air/water/soil pollution, source proximity, poverty, age, language proficiency, etc.) into GIS overlays and composite indexes or scores, such as in EPA’s EJSCREEN or California’s CalEnviroScreen online tools. Many states, such as California, Minnesota, and New Jersey, have proposed similar methods to inform permitting decisions.
While characterization has helped elucidate the ubiquity of impacts and their concentration onto certain places and populations, these methods have also revealed that they are largely subjective in terms of their utility and applications. For example, cumulative impact characterization differs between states and applications, suggesting that the best method is the one to which a given decision-maker will subscribe, rather than a single best method based on scientific risks or thresholds. Academic papers published on cumulative impacts largely go unnoticed by decision-makers if those decision-makers were not involved in its inception. Cumulative impact characterization is also a concern of critics, who contend that programs, policies, and decisions are being based on subjective assumptions rather than objective health risks. Further, national tools, while often used to describe communities in presentations and articles, have rarely, if ever, been documented to affect policy change or provide measurable improvements in people’s health.
This symposium will be of interest to investigators working with communities and populations bearing disproportionate burdens of exposures as well as researchers examining the relationships between chemical and non-chemical stressors. Audience members will learn of different approaches to quantifying cumulative impacts and if/how these methods could be generalized to other communities. Finally, this symposium will provide some guidance to decisions-makers on how results from cumulative impacts can be incorporated into interventions and policies.