The problem
Air pollution is considered by the WHO to be the greatest environmental risk to health. Outdoor air pollution is responsible for 4.2 million worldwide deaths every year. However, not everyone is equally affected by it. People will be impacted differently depending on their age and health conditions but also their socioeconomic status that influences people’s ability to cope with this environmental stressor. Government bodies are designed to be ‘just’ institutions and although legislation is based on these principles of justice, their implementation can often disproportionately impact on vulnerable and marginalised communities. This issue led to the concepts of Environmental and Territorial Justice (ETJ) which aims to address these inequalities by establishing links between environmental issues (such as air pollution) and social determinants and assess the territorial fairness, contributing to improve citizen engagement.
The objectives
The ALICE project will explore all these concepts and perform a three folded environmental justice analysis. Its main objectives are: i) to build a distributive justice analysis for Portugal via the quantitative assessment of spatial relationships between air pollution concentrations (NO2, O3, PM10, PM2.5), emissions, health, and local demographic and socioeconomic data in the past and present time; ii) assess the perception of citizens regarding environmental (in)justice (justice as recognition), focusing on air pollution; iii) assess procedural justice at a local scale, thought the means of a policy analysis.
The methodology
The project is organized in 7 Tasks. The first three will occur simultaneously and they will provide an extensive dataset on environmental stressor (air pollution data, considering both monitored and modelled data), socioeconomic indicators and health data, respectively. In Task 4 these data will be processed using statistical tools, investigating the relationship between social status, living places and exposure to air pollutants. The people’s perception of environmental inequalities [objective ii)] will be evaluated in Task 5 (based on survey approach). The data collected in these tasks will be used in Task 6 to support the integrated and multiscale assessment of Environmental and territorial Justice [objective i) and iii)]. Finally, Task 7 is dedicated to the production of the guidelines and a decision support system for policy makers, developed based on the project findings.
This study will be performed at national and local levels. The first will be done with high spatial stratification (parish level) and twenty years (according to the CENSUS availability: 2001, 2011, 2021) will be assessed. The latter will comprise two pilot case-studies in the Region of Aveiro (one urban and one rural).
The expected outcomes
The main ALICE outcomes will be the first (and high-detailed) environmental and territorial justice study for Portugal, with the assessment of the evolution of environmental inequalities over time (present and recent past) together with the integration of citizens’ engagement and social perceptions. The recommendations/guidelines produced at the end of the project – to the decision-makers, stakeholders and scientific community, and its adequate exploitation are the main potential societal impact of the ALICE project, which on the other hand, will have large consequents in terms of economic impacts, since fair and healthy societies are more productive and efficient communities.
Besides the typical scientific dissemination indicators (i.e. conference communications, scientific publications and academic thesis), and multilingual (PT/EN) communication tools (webpage, social media networks), the consortium intends to organize the first National Conference on Environmental and territorial Justice and Sustainable Development.
These outcomes are aligned with the Green Deal strategy in several hot topics, namely “Decarbonisation”; “Science policy integration” and “Society engagement” in a “Sustainable & inclusive future”.
The consortium
To achieve the aforementioned objectives, an interdisciplinary team from the Universities of Aveiro and Coimbra was established, which includes air quality specialists (PI research group), environmental economic and statistical researchers (Peter Roebeling and Sonia Gouveia, respectively), as well as experts on sociological field (Elisabete Figueiredo, the Co-PI of the project) and legal experts (Alexandra Aragão). Experts from national and international institutions were also invited to join the team, as external advisors, that are experts on air pollution and environmental justice (Enda Hayes from the University of the West of England) and public health (João Paulo Teixeira National Institute of Health). The wide knowledge and experience of these scientific team on such distinct areas, together with the involvement and participation of stakeholders, will be crucial for the accomplishment and success of the project.