One of the hashtags I follow on LinkedIn is #environmentaljustice. A friend asked me, in the light of the Black Lives Matter protests and pandemic hardships, why not #socialjustice? Good question.
One brief definition of environmental justice (EJ) (sometimes referred to as ‘environmental equality’) is “an equitable distribution of environmental benefits between all communities”; social justice (SJ) can be defined as “an equitable distribution of wealth (i.e. economic gains), opportunities and privileges within a society.”
EJ is therefore an integral part of SJ – without the former the latter is incomplete.
EJ is more than about the maintenance and improvement of urban and rural spaces; what truly defines the concept is how and why environmental benefits and harm are spread amongst different communities. Not surprisingly, lower income households are more likely to live in poor-quality environments, which are less expensive and more conducive to chronic lung conditions and disturbed sleep.
It has been argued that developments that cause pollution also provide jobs so it’s a trade-off. However, this is unfair / unjust because only the less well-off are forced into such unhealthy trade-offs – the more affluent can afford to live elsewhere.
It’s not only the lower income who suffer environmental injustices. HS2, for example, is foisting untold environmental (and social) damage along its route, e.g. in Buckinghamshire, yet no station is planned for the county to even begin to ‘mitigate’ the damage.
Economic gain for London and Birmingham does not justify environmental pain for, say, Calvert, even if the affected communities are not perceived to be impoverished.
So when evaluating EJ, how economic and environmental impacts are distributed spatially and geographically is just as important as the aggregate numbers.
The UK Government’s commitment to this issue is mixed, incomplete and not joined up:
· One of the objectives of DEFRA's 25 Year Plan (2018) is to ensure “an equal distribution of environmental benefits, resources and opportunities”. Sounds good, except there are holes in the Plan’s supporting data leading to too many unanswered questions [i].
· The National Planning Policy Framework (updated 2019) has greater clout than the Environment Plan and is silent on how environmental gains and losses are to be shared, or even measured.
· The Sustainable Development headline indicator of Environmental Inequality was only reported for three years before being dropped.
I am a great believer in chasing down the most fundamental cause(s) of a problem before even beginning to understand how it might be solved. Keep asking ‘why?’ and ‘how come?’ until you hit a brick wall, then work back up again with staged solutions. With EJ, the unanswered questions in the 25 Year Plan make this trickier, but I’ve made some progress and have some candidate causes:
1) How Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is defined, measured and worshipped – this directs development and, often, more pollution into London and the southeast, and discourages less polluting development options such as tunnels in favour of quick and dirty embankments;
2) The policy goal of negatively impacting the fewest number of people – this discriminates against rural communities;
3) Conceptualising the environment as an economic resource – this encourages the unjust “trade-off” rationale discussed above.
It’s because the EJ concept has such a lower public profile than SJ that I elected to fly the EJ flag so that the SJ job can be more effective.
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