By Kayla Rinderknecht, MPH & Paul Mathewson, Ph.D.
Summary
Environmental quality is an important determinant of community health via the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land we play on. To identify areas that experience high environmental burdens in terms of exposure to pollution and other environmental health risks, Environmental Health Indices have been developed.
Environmental Health indices look at multiple pollutants using a variety of sources and combine them into a single score to give a broad picture of the overall environmental health in an area. Higher scores on these indices, indicating worse environmental conditions, have been linked to various health problems such as increased asthma, cancer, adverse pregnancy outcomes, and cardiovascular disease.
Because these indices describe the cumulative impact of multiple environmental risks, they represent a good starting place to understand where environmental health burden is the highest in Wisconsin and who is most affected. Here, we explore what picture of environmental health burden that two existing Environmental Health Indices show for Wisconsin.
Key takeaways:
- The vast majority (70-95%) of census tracts with the highest environmental burden were in the southeast region, mostly concentrated in the Milwaukee urban area.
- As the minority population in an area increases, overall environmental burden also increases.
- There is a 52-percentile-point difference in total environmental burden between the least white and most white neighborhoods, the second largest gap among surrounding states.
- Air pollution is the leading cause of racial/ethnic exposure disparities in environmental health risks, and Wisconsin has a 60-percentile-point difference in cumulative air pollution exposure between the least white and most white neighborhoods disparity for air pollution among surrounding states, the largest gap among surrounding states.
This analysis is intended to be the starting point for understanding environmental determinants of health in Wisconsin. It highlights where the greatest environmental burden occurs, who is impacted, and the environmental health disparities that currently exist to inform efforts to address these burdens and disparities. Next steps include investigation of individual exposures within these indices to better understand what is driving environmental burden and related health disparities for communities in Wisconsin.
One important limitation of these existing indices is that they do not account for drinking water quality. For example, they do not consider the widespread nitrate contamination in private wells in rural areas of the state. This will be an important gap to fill to gain a more complete picture of environmental health burden throughout the state.
