An environmental justice analysis of air pollution emissions in the United States from 1970 to 2010.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 38233427.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-023-43492-9 and PMC identifier 10794183.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Over the last decades, air pollution emissions have decreased substantially; however, inequities in air pollution persist. We evaluate county-level racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in emissions changes from six air pollution source sectors (industry [SO<sub>2</sub>], energy [SO<sub>2</sub>, NO<sub>x</sub>], agriculture [NH<sub>3</sub>], commercial [NO<sub>x</sub>], residential [particulate organic carbon], and on-road transportation [NO<sub>x</sub>]) in the contiguous United States during the 40 years following the Clean Air Act (CAA) enactment (1970-2010). We calculate relative emission changes and examine the differential changes given county demographics using hierarchical nested models. The results show racial/ethnic disparities, particularly in the industry and energy generation source sectors. We also find that median family income is a driver of variation in relative emissions changes in all sectors-counties with median family income >$75 K vs. less generally experience larger relative declines in industry, energy, transportation, residential, and commercial-related emissions. Emissions from most air pollution source sectors have, on a national level, decreased following the United States CAA. In this work, we show that the relative reductions in emissions varied across racial/ethnic and socioeconomic groups.