It is now commonly understood that much of the worldwide burden of environmental ill health falls disproportionately on poorer peoples [1,2]. There is also substantial evidence that much environmental damage internationally is the result of the actions of richer nations or richer groups within nations—with impacts on poorer nations and poorer groups within nations [1,3,4]. It is becoming clear also that poorer peoples internationally experience multiple environmental harms, and that these may have a cumulative effect.

The world is becoming more urbanized, and cities are becoming the locus for many of the local issues of environmental damage and environmental harm [4,5]. But cities are also responsible for substantial international environmental damage: for example, it is increasingly evident that cities are one of the main generators of climate change, and that the actions of people in cities in the rich world are deeply linked to the well-being of the overall ecosystem and of people worldwide.

Environmental justice is a concept that links the environmental health science documenting these harms, to debates around rights, justice and equity. It fundamentally deals with the distribution of environmental goods and harms—and looks at who bears those harms and who is responsible for creating those harms, in both a practical sense but also in terms of policy decisions. It is a radical environmental health movement that has evolved from civil society groups, angered at what they perceive as the `unjust' distribution of environmental resources for health and, conversely the `unjust' distribution of environmental harms. The movement now includes a collaboration of non-governmental organizations with environmental scientists, public health professionals, and lawyers, all working on the issue of the distributions of environmental harms and the rights of everyone to a healthy environment.

This special issue is both timely and important. Environmental justice is moving conceptually and empirically. It started in the US as a movement of local civil society groups against local environmental injustice and distribution of environmental harms [6]. It is becoming a movement that encompasses international environmental injustices and issues of access to environmental goods—and it discusses environmental justice issues both across countries and also across generations. One such definition was pulled together by academics and NGOs in the UK in 2001:

'that everyone should have the right and be able to live in a healthy environment, with access to enough environmental resources for a healthy life'

'that responsibilities are on this current generation to ensure a healthy environment exists for future generations, and on countries, organisations and individuals in this generation to ensure that development does not create environmental problems or distribute environmental resources in ways which damage other peoples health' [7].

This kind of broad definition of environmental justice has been gaining currency internationally, and language around justice is moving into many topic areas of environmental science—shifting discourse on 'climate change' to 'climate justice', 'water pollution' to 'rights to clean water', 'air pollution' to 'rights to healthy air'.

Policy is changing too. In Europe the public is gaining more access to information on environmental harms through policy mechanisms such as the Aarhus Convention [8,9] and internationally, civil society groups are becoming aware that there are mechanisms to support them if they challenge environmental pollution. As the public becomes more aware of the issues of environmental justice, and as policy shifts in this direction, environmental scientists have a challenge. We have some of the methodology necessary to measure the distribution of environmental harms and environmental responsibilities. But we also need to develop new methods to deal with the new challenges: for example, how do we measure when an issue of water contamination becomes an issue of environmental injustice? How do we measure the impacts of environmental harm today on future generations? How do we measure the distribution of multiple or cumulative impacts on poorer groups? How do we quantify the responsibility of richer citizens in the world for the environmental harms distributed unequally to the poorer citizens?

The papers in this focus issue do not answer all these questions, but we hope that this theme will recur in Environmental Research Letters and that more environmental scientists will begin to frame their analyses around the critical issues of distributions of environmental harms and benefits.

References

[1] United Nations Environment Programme 2007 Global Environmental Outlook 2007 (Nairobi: United Nations Environment Programme)

[2] UNICEF 2005 The State of the World's Children 2005 (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

[3] World Resources Institute 2002 Wastes Produced from Industrialised Countries available from www.wri.org

[4] Stephens C and Stair P 2007 Charting a new course for urban public health State of the World 2007: Our Urban Future ed L Stark (New York: W W Norton) pp 134–48

[5] Lee K N 2007 An urbanizing world State of the World 2007: Our Urban Future ed L Stark (New York: W W Norton) pp 3–22

[6] United States Environmental Protection Agency 2003 Environmental Justice available from www.epa.gov/compliance/environmentaljustice/

[7] Stephens C, Bullock S and Scott A 2001 Environmental justice: rights and mean to a healthy environment for all Special Briefing Paper Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Global Environmental Change Programme (Brighton: ESRC Global Environmental Change Programme, University of Sussex) p 3 available from www.foe.co.uk/resource/reports/environmental_justice.pdf

[8] United Nations Economic Commission for Europe Convention on Access to Information 1999 Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (Geneva: UNECE)

[9] United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) 2007 Aarhus Clearinghouse for Environmental Democracy available from aarhusclearinghouse.unece.org/

Focus on Environmental Justice And Health Internationally Contents

The articles below represent the first accepted contributions and further additions will appear in the near future.

Environmental justice in Scotland: policy, pedagogy and praxis

Eurig Scandrett

Exploring the joint effect of atmospheric pollution and socioeconomic status on selected health outcomes: the PAISARC Project

Denis Bard, O Laurent, L Filleul, S Havard, S Deguen, C Segala, G Pedrono, E Riviere, C Schillinger, L Rouil, D Arveiler and D Eilstein

Environmental justice and the distributional deficit in policy appraisal in the UK

G P Walker

The dilemma of contact: voluntary isolation and the impacts of gas exploitation on health and rights in the Kugapakori Nahua Reserve, Peruvian Amazon

Dora A Napolitano and Aliya S S Ryan

Impacts of petroleum activities for the Achuar people of the Peruvian Amazon: summary of existing evidence and research gaps

Martí Orta Martínez, Dora A Napolitano, Gregor J MacLennan, Cristina O'Callaghan, Sylvia Ciborowski and Xavier Fabregas

Health impacts of an environmental disaster: a polemic

Danny Dorling, Anna Barford and Ben Wheeler

Environmental injustice: case studies from the South

Enrique Cifuentes and Howard Frumkin