Description:
The intersection of COVID-19 and the climate crisis have a disproportionate impact on communities around the globe. We investigate the intertwining of these crises and the magnitude of their severity. Lending expert judgement are the two following Duke academics:
Kay Jowers is a senior policy associate at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions. Her work focuses on analyzing state regulatory and policy approaches to addressing environmental issues and engages with environmental equity, ethics, and justice in particular. She is the Nicholas Institute’s lead on the PLANET Project, a collaboration with the Kenan Institute for Ethics, and co-directs the Environmental Justice Lab, a collaboration with the Duke Economics Department.
Michael Bergin is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke University. His research focuses on the influence of air pollution on both climate and human health. He has investigated the impacts of particulate matter (PM) around the world in places such as Greenland, China, and India. He is also involved in developing and deploying the next generation of air quality sensors to inform citizens on the quality of the air they are breathing so that they can make informed decisions to improve their air.
Credits:
Writers:
Matthew Brune ‘23, Rishab Jagetia ‘24, Georgie Stammer ‘24, Yuna Oh ‘24, Ryan Lou ‘24, Sofia Guerrero ‘24, Zoe Macomber ‘24
Voice Work:
Matthew Brune ‘23, Katherine Li ‘22, Natasha Von Seelen ‘21
Guests:
Dr. Kay Jowers
Dr. Michael Bergin
Audio Editors:
Zoe Macomber ‘24, Katherine Li ‘22
Music:
reCreation by airtone
Inspired by Kevin MacLeod
Transcript:
MATTHEW: On a college campus, we are privileged. Our worries are not about if the lights will turn on when we flip the switch, or if the water bill has been paid.
KATHERINE: The protections against the outside world are provided to us. We get masks, we get tests, we get a flashy Student Health building.
NATASHA: Even when we go home, our zip-code protects most of us from these threats.
But make no mistake: these are threats to our very existence and livelihood. We are dealing with two worldwide crises right now, crises that fall upon the shoulders of you and me alike.
MATTHEW: What exactly are these crises? How does my mask relate to environmental racism? How does my zip code impact the COVID-19 mortality rate of those around me?
KATHERINE: We’re here to answer these questions, joined today by Dr. Kay Jowers and Dr. Mike Bergin.
NATASHA: When considering how pollution and climate change affect different communities, we often look to “environmental racism.”
MATTHEW: Environmental racism entails that certain racial groups are disproportionately targeted by policies that disadvantage them through polluted air, water, and land.
KATHERINE: In the 1970s and 80s, the term “environmental justice” came out of the majority-black town of Afton, NC, when residents fought against the state putting a toxic landfill in their community (Living Downstream Podcast: Birthplace of Environmental Justice).
NATASHA: While environmental justice encompasses both socioeconomic and geographical disadvantages, it primarily shows itself through racist practices that target black and brown communities.
MATTHEW: The term BIPOC is typically used when referring to communities of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
KATHERINE: Multiple studies have shown that these BIPOC communities are exposed to higher levels of particulate matter, dangerous aromatic chemicals like lead and benzene, and other forms of pollution (Newkirk II).
HOST: We spoke to Dr. Jowers to discuss environmental racism and environmental justice.
MATTHEW: Would you be able to explain a little bit more about the planet project that you're working on, and more about the environmental justice lab that you co direct here at Duke?
JOWERS: Yeah, the environmental justice lab really centers around environmental equality and equity, and looks at various ways that we can address those in inequities and injustices that are primarily experienced by people of color and low income communities, and through the Planet Project, we were engaging with decision makers around the ethics of decision making and how sometimes political expediency makes it difficult to consider all of the different issues that come up when we're dealing with environmental injustice. And in the Environmental Justice Lab, we do computational social science work alongside students to address empirical research questions that EJ communities really need answered.
HOST: One of the goals of this episode was to understand what environmental racism truly is. Kay offered a few words about this topic and how social inequality and environmental racism are interconnected:
JOWERS: Yeah, so the pandemic has had both its own direct impact, and has been a crisis that has highlighted injustices and inequities that have always existed. The infection rates and the death rates, there's an association there that the COVID-19 infection rates and death rates go up in areas with high air pollution. And when you consider that our presidential administration in the United States has rolled back a lot of environmental regulations around air pollution and other environmental standards that would have mitigated those direct impacts from that air pollution mixed with COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has also highlighted pre existing inequalities that we see where LOW INCOME COMMUNITIES, COMMUNITIES OF COLOR are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards and those environmental hazards could be things outside. It could be factories, manufacturing facilities, highways, other land uses that are collocated in close proximity to neighborhoods that are predominantly low income or made up of people of color. There's been disinvestment in housing and neighborhoods that are lower income and occupied by people of color, such that there's a big disparity in the quality of the houses that people live in. So that could be more exposed to indoor air pollutants and indoor hazards from lead paint in older homes there could be also asthma triggers in homes and other sorts of environmental exposures.
HOST: Now that we’ve zoomed out in a general sense, let’s now focus on how this is playing out at Duke and in Durham.
Here’s what she had had to say about gentrification and inequality in Durham and in North Carolina.
JOWERS: The role of gentrification is something that we're really looking at, particularly in the EJ lab and with the work that I do...We really look at how many people are displaced by gentrification pressures and when they are displaced, what sorts of neighborhoods do they end up in and how does their ability to protect themselves from environmental exposures change. So are they moving to places that are even more polluted than the one that they lived in? How much housing insecurity and energy poverty increases as the-even if they're able to stay in their neighborhood as the houses around them are renovated and redeveloped and the property values go up. And so the tax values go up and so if they own their home their tax bill has gone up. If they rent their landlords tax bill has gone up. So maybe the rent has gone up. So as that burden increases, are they then less able to pay for energy, water, quality food, all of the other things that make-that are really human rights to have adequate housing and access to water. So it’s something we are exploring, but it certainly seems that the pressures of gentrification are pushing people who are already living at the margins further into those margins.
Environmental justice as a principal and a movement really started around waste and the location of landfills and particularly hazardous waste landfills. And so in many communities. It was that these big landfills are being located nearby in other communities, it becomes an issue of there is a Power plant that has co pollutants and and greenhouse gases that are an issue and some. It could be that the land on which that neighborhood is situated was land that Was historically undesirable and floods, a lot and they may not have the infrastructure to deal with the flooding and so The tricky part about your question is environmental justice and environmental inequalities are very community specific
HOST: That is a little gloomy, but Dr. Jowers did offer some advice for handling the pandemic in Durham based on her experiences with environmental policy.
MATTHEW: On a local level, what are some things local governments can do to curb the spread of COVID-19 in these high-risk communities that have worked for environmental policy?
JOWERS: So we started modeling that and other moratoria around not cutting people's electricity off not cutting off their water in the middle of the pandemic and found that those are sometimes even more important than the mask restrictions and stay at home orders that having those policies in place that ensure that people have access to water access to electricity and adequate housing that that slowed the the infection rate, more so than some of the other things, not that those other policies aren't also important, but that may be the key policies to keep in place are those that provide that kind of security.
HOST: Just to reiterate, Jowers emphasized that providing basic necessities like electricity and housing are crucial to stemming the spread of COVID-19. This goes to show that a one-dimensional outlook is not constructive for solving issues like environmental racism or the pandemic. Finding the intersectionality between the issues is the best way to approach them.
NATASHA: It’s clear that we can't acknowledge climate change without talking about its social implications, especially for BIPOC.
MATTHEW: Similarly, COVID-19's true impact can only be understood in the context of environmental inequality, namely air quality and pollution.
KATHERINE: As it stands today, air pollution is the cause for 1 in every 6 deaths worldwide (BBC).
NATASHA: Air pollution by humans, including nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and fine particulate matter, have been linked to a greater likelihood to die from coronavirus.
MATTHEW: According to a study conducted by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, there is an 8% increase in mortality from COVID-19 infection for every 1 microgram per cubic meter in air pollution.
HOST: We were joined by Dr. Mike Bergin to discuss the connection between COVID-19 and air quality.
BERGIN: … It did not apparently reduce air pollution drastically within the US, at least for particulate matter. And maybe if no sound so it didn't appear that there were drastic reductions and it's very interesting. I think we've done a pretty good job of controlling a lot of the obvious sources of our pollutants from power plant emissions to vehicles that are pretty low emitters, and even to industries that have been, you know, fairly well controlled so we didn't see huge dips in or improvement in air quality within the US and, of course, now we're sitting here in Chap-Durham, North Carolina in the air quality here is actually, it's, it's, we have very clean air and and I know this because we've been monitoring the air quality in Durham in and around campus at Duke. And it's been very clean and we're watching it now and it's still very clean. But then there are other places where if you look around the world where deaths due to air pollution are kind of the largest and these are in you know developing countries, places like India. Of course, China and in developing places that have lots of industry and cars that are really high emitters and South America a place South America would be like this. I think you know in Delhi, they were seeing, you know, people were seeing blue skies, for the first time in a very long time. So I think there were huge improvements in air quality. if you look at a place like India, where traffic was, you know, huge decreases in traffic with, you know, a relatively high meeting fleet. Industry was closed down things like brick kilns were closed down that emit tons of pollution and probably way less power use, I would imagine. So I think we saw dramatic improvements in air quality. In a lot of places, not necessarily in the U.S.
HOST: Bergin clearly outlines the disparity in health outcomes due to pollution between the U.S. and the developing world. While we take our air quality for granted at Duke, it is a crisis that must be collectively addressed around the world. After, he explored the connections between climate-change induced air pollution and COVID-19 respiratory symptoms.
BERGIN: I'm not 100% an expert on this but you know certainly air quality does create, you know, respiratory stress and irritation and inflammation in the respiratory system. And I think, of course. COVID does the same thing. Although air pollution improved greatly in India, it was still at probably moderately unhealthy levels. And so the question would be, in places like India, where the air pollution, maybe even though it decreased to a state of moderately unhealthy levels that it exacerbated COVID compared to here.
HOST: While Bergin doesn’t explicitly endorse that air pollution exacerbates COVID-19, studies have shown that communities of color tend to have the greatest levels of air and other forms of pollution—another factor in COVID-19 vulnerability. A key indicator of COVID-19 vulnerability is environmental quality; specifically, air quality. (Mass gov. Report)
We were really interested to see what he thought about how Duke could address air pollution and improve air quality. Bergin had a few thoughts on this:
BERGIN: I think one simple rule is just buy less stuff. We think of all the goods that we buy, some of which are manufactured in the US, some of which aren’t, and all those goods have energy use and air pollution emissions associated with them so I think, first step is to buy the minimal amount of stuff as possible. I think using transportation in an efficient and minimal way to lower carbon emissions, and when you lower carbon emissions you lower the other emissions that come along with them. Sometimes i think it's hard to envision the pollution that we might associate with everything that we have, you know, being at Duke, living in the RT area, and being relatively affluent people. In the US, our energy use per capita is very very high, our municipal solid waste generation per capita is really really high, and I think those are two things that each of us can think about and try to minimize, and along with that comes less energy use and less pollutant emissions.
HOST: Here, Bergin emphasizes the role that individuals can play in addressing climate change and therefore COVID-19. However, we must also know that being minimalist consumers will not fix either of these crises. We must have an attitude shift in recognizing that there are corporations that take advantage of communities in North Carolina and around the world, exploiting their health and the environment in order to profit. Corporations like Duke Energy and Smithfield Farms are just some of the many corporations that have been facing pushback from environmental justice groups for years. The current corporate structure places at-risk communities EVEN MORE at risk than they already are, and they are tasked with facing these crises head on. We had one final question for Dr. Bergin.
MATTHEW: How does climate change impact air quality and air pollution?
BERGIN: Yeah, I mean I think the obvious influence the climate change has had on air pollution is these wildfires and I think what you really look for when it comes to climate change are our trends and things. So you need, you know, many years of seeing a trend… But what we're seeing the US certainly as the most obvious thing are these fires and certainly, these are you know I don't know when the smoke goes away and the smoke clears. I think we'll get a chance to reflect on looking at the hospital records and what the health effects have been, of course, the cost is going to have been substantial just the cost of the fires and replacing the houses and displaced people and insurance and all that stuff. But the health effects. I think we'll get a better handle on and you know I can imagine they're, they're pretty substantial.
NATASHA: The intersection of environmental justice and COVID-19 comes full circle when looking at the data that has been compiled in the past few months. Specifically, one case study in Massachusetts analyzes why this connection exists.
KATHERINE: The results find that air pollution, a strong indicator of vulnerability to COVID-19, is especially bad in communities of color.
MATTHEW: This phenomena is not restricted to Massachusetts or the United States--the report references “unusually high levels of SARS2003 mortality” in communities with disproportionately bad air quality.
NATASHA: This report is so important because it underscores the difference between environmental justice and COVID-19 in the U.S. as opposed to other countries.
KATHERINE: One of the reasons for the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on BIPOC communities is the disproportionate number of pre-existing health conditions present in the BIPOC population and unequal access to healthcare.
MATTHEW: The report also found that homeless communities were significantly more likely than the general population to contract COVID-19.
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