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University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) Professor Paul Mohai has published a new report that examined how new tools are leading to innovative policies to protect vulnerable communities from disproportionate environmental burdens.

“These tools that are coming online have been proving themselves to be very useful in both identifying disadvantaged communities, but they’ve also been groundbreaking in that they’re being used to make proactive decisions in the community,” says Mohai, adding that they are now developing tools that can help make decisions before crises occur. 

The new study includes an examination of matrix approaches, and how they could provide support and enhance academic research and the construction of decision-making tools where cumulative environmental impacts are a concern. The work has also enabled experts to start mapping where environmental burdens exist and to what extent, along with sociodemographic information at the census-tract and block group levels. The resulting data-rich maps provide tools that allow people to see where environmental and social stressors combine, which can identify which communities face the greatest accumulation of risk factors.

Read the full press release on the Michigan News website.

Study: Matrix Approaches for Cumulative Impact Assessments in Decision-Making (DOI: 10.1177/19394071251413002)