Adapting the CalEnviroScreen cumulative impact model to assess environmental burden, social vulnerability and disease in the Houston Metropolitan Area

The prevailing school of thought is that environmental injustices exist even as the debate continues over the mixed results from studies investigating environmental exposure, social disadvantage and negative health outcomes.  Disparities in exposures to environmental hazards are important in understanding the complex and persistent patterns of negative health status yet, these exposures are often times poorly understood.  With the advent of cumulative impact models, a scoring system based on geographic, socioeconomic, public health and environmental hazard criteria from publically available data shows promise in identifying areas of environmental burden and social vulnerability.  However, tests of cumulative impact models have hindered the impact of environmental justice centered research due to the continual creation of new models instead of testing existing ones.  Our study will 1) investigate the CalEnviroScreen model currently used in California to assess cumulative impacts in the Houston Metropolitan Area using their inclusive list of environmental exposures and effects to create an environmental burden score 2) expand upon their four socioeconomic factor indicators to include a segregation index to create a disadvantage score 3) incorporate medical records to better understand the impact of environmental modeling on the distribution of heart and respiratory illness and 3) integrate spatial and statistical analysis using impact scores derived from the CalEnviroScreen model.  Cumulative assessments provide a wealth of information about environmental exposures and population characteristics, however; using an existing model should be the first step in the research process and not the only step.  Integrating GIS methods with advanced statistical analysis using both impact scores and medical records is an opportunity to find the links that are currently missing in environmental justice research.   Expanding current models and methods has the potential to address current issues in environmental justice research and provide conclusive results that have proved elusive.