Is Environmental Justice a Global Health Concern?

China's Hunan province has a heavy metals problem. The province has long been an important region for heavy metal production and processing. Home to over a thousand non-ferrous metal companies, it had the third highest quantity of metals produced of China's provinces, in 2011. The worth of this production is approximately $60 billion. That money will fall a bit short of offsetting the $1.6 trillion it may cost to clean up the region's soil and waterways.

The pollution created during the processing of heavy metals in Hunan has claimed human lives and huge quantities of arable land. China's Ministry of Environmental Protection's investigation indicates that in 2006, 8.3 percent of China's arable land was contaminated to levels making it unsafe for agricultural purposes. Villagers in rural areas are finding alarming rates of heavy metal poisoning deaths in their communities and once productive fields and rice paddies have become places to avoid, let alone work in intensively. The villagers are effectively victims of structural violence, facing illness and economic disadvantages at the hands of industry and being effectively ignored by local and national government institutions (1).

A chemical factory beside a rice paddy in Yixing in Jiangsu Province, where industrial polluttion has contaminated soil and food crops.
Source: Yale360

Issues of environmental injustice, situations where specific social groups bear a disproportionate share of the affects of an environmental hazard, are global issues. Arsenic from gold mines in Africa makes its way into local waterways causing chronic and acute health issues in nearby villages, minority communities in the US are vastly more likely to have operational toxic facilities near them, and many other groups with relatively low social capitol across the world face the health impacts of environmental dangers. These sources of potential harm are prevalent in their communities, because their lower socioeconomic status increases the difficulty of keeping them outside of their communities (2).

While a definitive link between environmental inequality and disparity in community health has yet to be established, limited progress has been made in doing so. In the United States, it has yet to be quantitatively proven that communities which are burdened with our environmentally undesirable enterprises are more likely to suffer from health issues. That being said, I think it could be argued that a rural farmer in Hunan is clearly more likely to suffer from cadmium, lead and arsenic poisoning than local government officials or the operators of the plants creating the heavy metal pollution.

Large scale pollution can affect communities and individuals, but no where in the United Nations

Declaration of Human Rights is anyone guaranteed a living environment free of pollution. Pollution of the largest scale, the anthropocentric forces driving climate change, is the focus of the highly publicized UN Climate Summit being held in New York. Many of the more persuasive arguments for immediate changes to international climate change policies will have a human element, emphasizing that the actions of the world's major resources consumers will have an increased impact on the world's poor as our global climate shifts over the coming century. Basically, when facing decisions regarding the state of the environment, think people not polar bears.

Despite the lack of a research-proven, quantitative link between environmental justice issues and public health, should we be including environmental justice in our discussions about global health? Dr. Maria Neira, the WHO Director of the Department of Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health, would say so. In a commentary article published on Sept. 19th, in advance of the UN Climate Summit, Dr. Neira points to localized reduction in crop yields and increased numbers of disease carrying insects after flooding as ways in which the WHO's estimate of an increase of 250,000 deaths per year could be realized. Those who will be increasingly at risk are those who already bear the burden of under-nutrition and malaria, the world's poor, young and old (3).

So what do you think? Should global health policymakers and actors be concerned with environmental justice issues, or is the pursuit of environmental justice across the world someone else's battle?

References

(1) Guangwei, He. "The Soil Pollution Crisis in China: A Cleanup Presents Daunting Challenge." Yale Environment 360. 14 July 2014. Web. 29 Sept. 2014. <http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_soil_pollution_crisis_in_china_a_cleanup_presents_daunting_challenge/2786/>.

(2) Brulle, Robert, and David Pellow. "Environmental Justice: Human Health and Environmental Inequalities." Annual Review of Public Health 2006 27 (2005): 103-24. Annual Reviews. Annual Reviews. Web. 29 Sept. 2014. <annualreviews.org>.

(3) Neira, Dr. Maria. "Climate Change: An Opportunity for Public Health." World Health Organization: Media Centre. WHO, 19 Sept. 2014. Web. 29 Sept. 2014. <http://www.who.int/mediacentre/commentaries/climate-change/en/>.