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Transboundary air pollution and environmental justice: Vancouver and Seattle compared

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Abstract

This paper comparatively analyzes the association between urban neighborhood socioeconomic markers and ambient air pollution in Vancouver and Seattle, the two largest urban regions in the Georgia Basin-Puget Sound (GB-PS) international airshed. Given their similarities and common airshed, Vancouver and Seattle are useful comparators addressing not only whether socioeconomic gradients exist in urban environmental quality but also identifying clues to differences in these gradients between Canadian and American cities. Large air quality sampling campaigns and pollution regression mapping provide the pollution data, in this case nitrogen dioxide—a marker of traffic emissions considered the most important air pollutant for human health in the typical North American city. Pollution data are combined with neighborhood census data for regression and spatial analyses. Median household income is the most consistent correlate of air pollution in both cities, including their most polluted neighborhoods, although neighborhoods marked by immigrant populations do not correlate with high pollution levels in Vancouver as they do in Seattle.

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Notes

  1. Research methods included spatial coincidence (Sheppard et al. 1999), proximity analysis (Henderson et al. 2007; Jerrett et al. 2005a), exposure index (Farias et al. 2005) and air dispersion modeling (Dolinoy and Miranda 2004). A buffer analysis is superior to the point-in-polygon method as it uses spatial proximity as a measure of risk rather than spatial coincidence (Matson 2000).

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the BC Centre for Disease Control, via an agreement with Health Canada as part of the U.S.–Canada Border Air Quality Strategy. We thank the staff at the University of British Columbia and the University of Washington for their assistance with NOX sampling and subsequent analysis. Special thanks also go to the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) Air Pollution Ancillary Study at the University of Washington for their support on authorizing usage of the traffic pollution data for Seattle.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Environmental Health Sciences, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, USA

    Jason G. Su

  2. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Timothy Larson, Timothy Gould & Martin Cohen

  3. Department of Geography, Social Science Centre, University of Western Ontario, 1151 Richmond Street, N6A 5C2, London, ON, Canada

    Michael Buzzelli

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  1. Jason G. Su
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  5. Michael Buzzelli
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Correspondence to Michael Buzzelli.

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Su, J.G., Larson, T., Gould, T. et al. Transboundary air pollution and environmental justice: Vancouver and Seattle compared. GeoJournal 75, 595–608 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-009-9269-6

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