Assessing and addressing cumulative Impacts in communities: Approaches and lessons learned

Methods are needed to better address the environment that people experience in their communities. Predominant approaches focus on assessing and managing contaminants one at a time. However, significant inequalities result from the combined burden from multiple sources of contaminants in some communities. The term “cumulative impacts” refers to consideration of the combinations of multiple contaminants. It also refers to consideration of susceptibility and vulnerability of populations and the interaction of environmental factors with other health determinants. In its focus on reducing inequalities and in its integration of social determinants of health with environmental determinants of health, this framing of cumulative impacts promotes social justice. The impetus for taking action to reduce cumulative impacts has come from the environmental justice movement and is just beginning to receive attention in the science policy sector. This presentation describes the lines of scientific evidence supporting the need to address cumulative impacts; describes key elements of screening, community-initiated, and context-driven assessments; and discusses opportunities to address cumulative impacts in decisions that involve allocation of resources as well as in permitting and regulatory approaches, pointing out key challenges raised by the framing of cumulative impacts to the currently predominant paradigm for environmental health. The presentation concludes with a summary of lessons leaned in a recent project to develop such approaches in the State of California.