An empirical analysis of environmental inequality in the EU

Air, water, and soil pollution have been considered important human health hazards. However, exposure to these hazards is distributed very unequally in society. Many studies have found that minorities and low income populations are disproportionately living near environmental hazards such as toxic facilities or landfills, and are exposed to higher levels of industrial air pollution. These disparities have been named environmental inequality or environmental injustice and have received wide attention by academics, policy makers, and social and environmental movements. While the majority of these studies were conducted for the United States, so far only few studies exist using similar data and methodologies for the EU, and all of them are limited to single countries or regions. The main innovation of this project is therefore to the best of our knowledge the first empirical analysis of environmental injustice in the EU. While our main focus lies on air pollution, we will also investigate a wide range of other environmental hazards. We will identify industrial pollution hot-spots in the EU and their economic, environmental, and social impact. Moreover, we will conduct the first case study of socioeconomic environmental disparities for Vienna, Austria. We will finally link our findings to current environmental policy debates in the EU. We will especially focus on the distributional effects of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and the role of air-quality co-benefits of climate policies. To measure the distribution of environmental hazards and damages across space, we will use a wide range of novel point-source level and geographically small-area databases. These data will be combined with regional socioeconomic data to assess if socioeconomically disadvantaged regions and populations are exposed to worse environmental quality in the EU, using state-of-the art methods of empirical environmental justice research. For Vienna, Austria, we will analyze the relationship between air pollution and noise on the one hand and socioeconomic characteristics on the other hand, at the 250*250 meter grid-cell level, which is very highly disaggregated, even in comparison to most state-of-the-art US studies. With our findings, we will inform EU policy makers about the most important socioeconomic environmental disparities in the EU and their consequences for social, regional, and environmental policies.

Das Forschungsprojekt führte eine empirische Analyse von Umweltungleichheit in Zugang zu Luftqualität und anderen Umweltgefahren in EU Ländern durch. Es umfasste zwei wesentliche Dimensionen. Zum einen konzentrierte es sich auf die Erfassung EU-weiter sozioökonomische Disparitäten in Umweltqualität, wie zum Beispiel der Nähe zu Industriestandorten mit sehr hohen Umweltschäden. Zum anderen wurde die erste empirische Fallstudie zu Disparitäten in Feinstaubbelastung zwischen österreichischen Gemeinden durchgeführt. Darüber hinaus untersuchte das Projekt die verteilungspolitischen Auswirkungen von Umweltpolitiken, insbesondere des EU-Emissionshandelssystems, und erforschte die Rolle der Luftqualitäts Co-Benefits im Kontext der Klimapolitik.