Environmental Justice and Emerging Information Communication Technology: A Review for U.S. Natural Disaster Management

Introduction

Environmental justice developed, in part, as a direct critique of the general environmental movement as limiting its focus to the concerns of white, middle class people. ¹ Initial work focused on disparate environmental burdens, finding that across the United States, African American communities and low-income communities are more likely to be located near toxic facilities and other pollutants associated with health risks. ² The combined grass-roots movement for environmental justice and weight of scholarly evidence for patterns of injustice motivated President Clinton to sign Executive Order 12898 in 1994. ³ Since then many state and federal agencies have adopted environmental justice strategic plans. ⁴ This includes the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which created an updated Environmental Justice strategy in 2012. ⁵ As with the strategies created by other branches of the federal government at the same time, natural disaster preparedness, response, and recovery is infused through the narrative. The capacity for government interventions to exacerbate environmental injustices brought to light during Hurricane Katrina weighed heavily on the discourse. Less well represented in the 2012 strategies is the increasing and ever-evolving role that mobile phones, the Internet, and geographically explicit communication and data sharing technology are playing in natural disaster strategies. This article offers a literature review to understand whether the evolving relationship between society and technology is likely to require new natural disaster management approaches when environmental (in)justices are a concern.

When natural disaster strikes, responders need to know how and where to most effectively deploy aid. Communities need to know how to avoid unnecessary risk and access aid. Natural disaster responders need to communicate with each other and share evacuation and safety information. Increasingly, information sharing and resource allocation decisions are based on interactions and data stores from social media and other emerging information communication technologies (eICTs). eICT is a general term that includes mobile devices, social media, and geospatial technologies. The Internet and other eICTs have been discussed as having a number of potential benefits that include the rapid diffusion of reliable information and the ability to reach out to those experiencing personal distress, maintain communication within and between communities, and locate missing people. ⁶ For example, during recent natural disaster Hurricane Sandy, the U.S. government relied on Ushahidi, a crowdsourcing social media platform that aggregates real-time disaster-information sent in by mobile phone users through short message service (SMS) and Internet users to help emergency responders decide how they should allocate their limited resources most efficiently. ⁷ The efforts provided geo-locatable information through networks that tap into local knowledge when agency information is outdated or absent.

Often communication technologies, like those embedded in the Ushahidi example, are cited as key to improving natural disaster management. However, technology access and use is not always evenly distributed. ⁸ While eICT deployment in natural disasters provides an opportunity for fast and accurate information exchange among disaster planning agencies and between managers and the public, it may fail if it makes inaccurate assumptions about the distribution of user activity or environmental hazards. Thus, despite the opportunities for quicker information sharing created though technologies, systematized dependence on eICTs in natural disaster response could exacerbate uneven access to information, aid, and emergency response resources. As new technologies develop and disaster planners are deciding whether to use them, there is a need to understand how eICTs fit in to existing social structures and changes them. ⁹

Social disparities influence both the use culture of different technologies and the environmental impacts of natural disasters. Literature is concerned with differences among eICT users. These studies find the tendency for so-called digital divides to emerge because of differences in access to technological resources and technology use cultures. Concurrently, environmental hazards and natural disasters researchers focus on the distribution of amenities and burdens in the biophysical environment. Exposure to environmental hazards is also inequitable. With respect to access to technology and environmental benefits, groups with low access to resources are prone to experience adverse consequences as a result of uneven development. Among other factors, income level, gender, education, ethnicity, age, and immigration status are factors that often indicate differences in both eICT use and exposure to environmental hazards. ¹⁰ As such, the social factors that are linked to low information access are also associated with high levels of vulnerability to natural disasters. ¹¹ While we know that, generally, natural disasters create and exacerbate environmental injustices, ¹² we do not yet understand how technology intervenes.

This article applies an environmental justice framework in order to evaluate the emerging scholarly discourse around eICT use in natural disasters and identify frames of social and environmental inequity. We identify contradictions and gaps in the literature that suggest both a need for additional research and important policy questions as agencies continue to use eICTs along with or in place of older forms of mass communication related to natural disasters.

Environmental Justice as an Integrating Framework

Environmental justice provides a useful framework for examining the social and ecological dimensions of eICT use in natural disaster management. In this section, we present a framework based on work by Sze and London. ¹³ We apply the framework to the case of Hurricane Katrina before presenting the methods and results for a more complete literature review.

Over time, the expansion of environmental justice has motivated deeper theoretical consideration of the definition of injustice as well as of the phases through which a particular injustice may evolve and through which some form of justice may be achieved. ¹⁴ For our purposes, these definitions and phases provide a framework that can highlight whether concern for environmental justice is emerging in the literature and, if it is, the extent of the definition in operation. This is useful as a way to understand whether blind spots in the research limit our understanding of whether eICT deployment is sensitive to preconditions of natural disasters, creates uneven environmental and political circumstances, or otherwise changes risk.

Definitions of environmental justice are concerned with the distribution of vulnerable populations and hazards as well as the degree to which procedural elements of decision making allow for legitimate inclusion and adequate recognition of relevant stakeholders. ¹⁵ Distributional justice focuses on outcomes like the spatial arrangement of environmental burdens and benefits in relation to the racial and ethnic composition of communities. Transparent and fair decision making, or procedural justice, has since emerged as a second critical component of environmental justice definitions. ¹⁶ Rather than focus on the environmental burdens and benefits that are distributed, this procedural environmental justice focuses on governance and opportunities to contest hazard siting. ¹⁷ Lastly, environmental justice emphasizes recognition. Adequately recognizing the scope of an issue and identifying relevant stakeholders are preconditions for justice. ¹⁸ This definition suggests that problems are often framed in ways that exclude particular populations and experiences from consideration, or advocate for particular ways of managing human-nature relations.

The impact and recovery efforts of Hurricane Katrina illustrate how natural disasters exacerbate environmental justice through all three definitions. Beverly Wright highlights many of these instances in her recent study: ¹⁹ existing distributional injustices disproportionately changed the new toxic load for working class black neighborhoods. Proximity to toxic waste sites, high levels of heavy metal contamination on industrial sites, and other environmental burdens that had previously been near black communities were moved into communities by the disaster, enhancing the toxic burden of living there beyond that experienced in other regions. Further, these sites were cleaned up more slowly (distributional injustice) and to a lower standard (procedural injustice). Levee reconstruction increased protection in some white neighborhoods while providing no additional flood protection for the Ninth Ward and other working class and predominantly black communities, furthering procedural injustice, shifting the cost of rebuilding, reinvesting, and re-inhabiting on to residents while deterring financial investment from banks and insurance providers. The inadequate disaster management that left poor, minority, and elderly New Orleans residents stranded underscores recognition-based environmental injustice, as social context changed both the ways people experienced natural disaster and confronted assumptions about access to transportation and alternative housing that were inappropriate.

Environmental justice can also be understood through phases—problem negotiation, problem identification, and solutions—that can be understood as roughly successional. First, the negotiation phase of environmental justice highlights the potential for there to be many stakeholders involved in the formation of an environmental inequity and that their interests change over time and are informed by larger agendas for change, ideas about progress, and understandings of the world. ²⁰ Second, the use of a particular eICT during natural disaster management is not just a single event but an action bound up in a complicated history of political, social, economic, and ecological interaction. ²¹ The events that led up to and continued beyond a single perceived injustice are important parts of the problem identification phase. Third, the solution phase underscores outcomes designed to resolve, remediate, or otherwise improve environmental conditions so that the quality of life for low-income communities and communities of life is improved without simply displacing environmental hazards to other communities.

The injustices that Wright ²² illustrates in relation to Hurricane Katrina also illustrate how the phases of environmental justice unfold. There have been many instances through recovery in which stakeholders experiencing environmental injustices were not invited in to conversations about the future of the city, and where unique psychological experience with disaster were not accommodated, and thus, the extent to which recovery efforts have benefitted all New Orleans residents has been limited. Wright highlights a number of ways that inequities become more deeply entrenched as, for example, the “Safe Road Home” program privileged middle income white neighborhoods. Solutions have required re-thinking the best ways to reach and mobilize populations given the diaspora that followed the hurricane. Negotiating for equitable solutions has meant re-thinking and revising the demographic, geographic, and psychological patterns of identifying stakeholders and their relationship to flood risk, environmental contamination, and the politics of recovery. In particular, the diaspora created by the hurricane spread communities geographically, making digital forms of communication a growing form of identity maintenance and civic engagement. ²³

We conduct a review that extends beyond the ways that both natural disasters and the use of eICTs throughout disaster preparation, response, and recovery relate to environmental justice in the case of Hurricane Katrina to understand its influence in the U.S. at large.

Methods

To capture concern for environmental justice in relation to eICT use in natural disasters, we used Google Scholar ²⁴ and Scopus ²⁵ to search scholarly literature. Google Scholar applies a natural language processing algorithm weighted by the most highly cited sources. ²⁶ This supports our interest in identifying scholarly work that may be influential in establishing an operational definition of environmental justice relevant to eICT use in natural disasters. To enhance precision and remove duplicates, we cleared computer search histories and used combinations of search terms to capture eICTs used in natural disaster scenarios. We used the first three pages of search results from each combination of terms. Subsequent data cleaning steps were used to eliminate books, duplicate records, and records for which no full text could be located. These cleaning processes circumvent potential limitations associated with Google Scholar's lack of precision and propensity for capturing duplicated results. ²⁷ Repeating searches in Scopus addressed potential biases due to the algorithm in Google Scholar. ²⁸

In total, we included 460 unique publications that addressed natural disasters and eICTs. From the original set of publications, we used a collaborative qualitative coding process to rate the relevance of each publication to environmental justice. ²⁹ From the full text of each, the 161 publications were identified as relevant to environmental justice and either eICTs or natural disaster management. Ninety-three articles specifically focus on the U.S. Below we discuss themes that emerged and notable omissions.

Results

Our results suggest that strategies for implementing eICTs in a way that is sensitive to environmental justices are emerging. Results indicate that when publications addressed environmental justice themes, they most commonly discussed issues related to diversity among stakeholders (62 publications) and/or presented technology as a mechanism to promote collaboration (50 publications). Articles only rarely discussed eICT use outside of disaster response, and only 11 publications discussed distribution-based solutions. Few publications (70) discuss ways in which eICTs may exacerbate the environmental ills associated with inadequate and inequitable preparation, response, and recovery from natural disasters (Table 1). Studies expressly concerned with patterns of eICT use during disasters find that their use often reproduces long-standing patterns in social inequity. ³⁰ However, the differences in technology adoption and use among traditionally vulnerable populations is sometimes higher than for the population in general. This suggests a potential opportunity, but more research is needed to understand how populations use this technology and factors that affect the degree to which information is perceived as trustworthy. None of the studies included in the review discussed the potential for cumulative environmental hazards to change the risk portfolio of low-income communities, communities of color, or other social groups that often experience environmental injustice. However, many studies were wary that systemized biases among social media users and crowdsourcing participants could present barriers to addressing natural-disaster risk and prioritizing recovery in a way that promotes environmental justice.

Discussion

The literature review reveals that there is no literature concerned with the environmental (in)justice of eICT use in natural disaster management. However, there are studies that address environmental justice concerns in other fields. These studies introduce the need to recognize both the virtual and real-world identities of the public into risk communication planning. Virtual identity is shaped by the ability to gain access to a technology, technology use patterns, and technology use preferences. Most studies focus on the use of technology during acute disasters, however many acknowledge the potential for eICTs to facilitate wider public participation in planning for disaster and for prioritizing clean-up.

The predominant focus in the literature is on risk communication from expert groups to the general public. These studies suggest that eICTs introduce a second typology of stakeholder identities that effect risk communication. Gaining access to technology has conventionally been a matter of personal capacity and access to infrastructure. The initial “digital divide” separated affluent, white, and urban populations from the rest of the U.S. Many digital divide discrepancies have traditionally correlated with race, class, and other cultural characteristics that limit access to material goods. ³¹ The spatial nature of the divide, in this sense, is consistent with many of the distributional concerns associated with natural disasters. For example, Lee et al. found that age, income, gender, and education affected the number of eICTs an individual was using (Internet, wireless Internet, and/or smartphone Internet access). ³²

Low access to and use of eICTs it is not completely coincidental to vulnerability to natural disasters. Traditionally vulnerable groups have been able to leapfrog over technologies in favor of flexible and comparatively cheaper options. For example, personal computer and mobile phone technologies are owned and used less frequently by Latinos in the U.S. than by non-Hispanic whites, but smartphone use is higher. ³³ The Internet-capable device's reliance on satellite technologies and multiple functions replace multiple devices.

As physical access improves, digital limitations persist across differences in technological skill, language ability, and concern for privacy. ³⁴ We found that many publications were concerned that eICTs may create new forms of social inequity because they can create psychological deterrents to natural disaster readiness. Risk perception plays a large role. In the studies we evaluated, eICTs do not seem to disrupt the robust observation that people process risk-based information differently depending on age, race, class, and gender. For some cases, messages transmitted through eICTs may reinforce fatalistic sentiments, and therefore reduce preparation and increase fear, exacerbating experiences with negative environmental impacts. ³⁵ These effects are stronger for populations who process risk-based information differently from disaster managers. ³⁶ In order to be useful in a natural disaster, users need to perceive eICTs as an appropriate and productive way to communicate about disasters.

Twitter has emerged in the literature as an eICT that has been useful for grassroots organizing around environmental issues. For example, Sutton found that Twitter was an instrumental tool in gaining national attention for a 2008 coal ash spill in the Tennessee River. ³⁷ The limitation of relying on Twitter or other similar social media platforms is that they are used by small, often unrepresentative portions of the public. Twitter, for example, reaches only 16% of the population. ³⁸ Although there may be spillover effects as Twitter users share information with their contacts, ³⁹ its relatively low use rate may be limiting, especially when technology users are intended to represent the larger public. ⁴⁰ The decentralized nature of Twitter also means that it can be limited as an information dissemination tool. Research has found that use patterns differ between those that provide egocentric information and those who share information beyond their personal experience. ⁴¹ Meaningful information can be buried in a sea of irrelevant tweets. Further, parsing information like location from Twitter and social media sites that may provide real-time crowdsourced data is not yet completely automated as the linguistics of social media speak often cannot be parsed by the algorithms in existing automated location identification software. ⁴² The benefits and risks associated with other eICTS are likely to accumulate differently. ⁴³

Conclusions

Our results reveal potential oversights that might ultimately undermine the potential for eICTs to improve environmental conditions for marginalized social groups. Collectively, the review highlights that researchers are concerned with distributional barriers that result from disparities in infrastructure and technology use that make an eICT less reliable for some groups than for the population overall. Differences in risk aversion observed in relation to traditional ICTs are also barriers to messages received by eICT, which highlights the need to recognize diversity among stakeholders and develop responses and response delivery systems to provide niche messages. Publications focused on trust barriers examine why vulnerable groups often seem to disregard natural disaster messages. There was little evidence of scholarship that asks whether eICTs are posed to redress these barriers. Although rarely considered, the studies that address disparate access to eICTs during natural disaster demonstrate the need for deeper consideration of the technologies we implement, the communication systems we adopt, and the emergency management plans we develop may affect groups of people differently before establishing new protocols for relying on eICTs.

The review suggests that eICTS create a paradox, whereby increasing reliance on niche technologies further disenfranchises communities already experiencing disproportionate environmental burden in association with natural disasters because, in many cases, they are also less likely to use these technologies. Unless implementation strategies are developed to be sensitive to different communities, eICTs will continue to drive inequalities that inevitably lead to an increased vulnerability to natural disasters, such as income status, gender, and education levels.

Simply equalizing access to technology is not a panacea: some of the articles suggest that even when new forms of technology are widely available, at-risk groups are still disadvantaged by their social and economic standing. Although communication networks are growing rapidly, the increased availability of technology does not necessarily equate to more productive uses: networks failures and other limitations have all been shown to hamper the availability of crisis information. ⁴⁷ However, the disparities in eICT use and vulnerability to natural disasters are not parallel, suggesting that when thoughtfully selected, eICTs can be a useful tool for preventing natural disasters from exacerbating environmental injustice.

There is a need to develop a more complete understanding of virtual interactions and their relationship to community organizing and environmental change. In a review of social media use in disasters, Alexander ⁴⁸ calls its use in disaster response “inevitable, owing to the sheer weight of public usage of such facilities.” The question then, is much wider than how should agencies generate information, but how should they capture it and interpret it.