People of color and low-income people will face the harshest effects from loss of natural land cover over the next 80 years, according to new research by the University of Vermont and the Gund Institute for Environment.
Researchers used existing government data and demographic projections for counties across the United States to model changing land use and its impact on three environmental or health benefits: air quality, crop pollination and protection from West Nile virus, which was used as an indicator of insect-borne disease.
They modeled four scenarios based on possible market trends and environmental policies, and found people of color in the United States will experience an estimated 224% decrease in air quality, an 118% decrease in crop pollination and an 111% decrease in control of vector-borne disease.
In contrast, white Americans will generally see benefits across all three categories, and high-income communities will experience benefits in air quality and vector-borne disease control.
“The punchline is that the projections show that we’re going to lose nature, and as we lose nature, we’re going to lose those benefits,” said Natalia Aristizábal, a Gund graduate fellow who contributed to the study. “But more importantly, those benefits and the loss of them are going to affect different populations. Especially people of color and people of lower income are going to see those declines being impacted the most.”
Existing projections had already indicated that urban areas will increase in population, while rural ones will shrink in the next 80 years. It predicted that demographic groups will become more segregated over time, the Gund team said.
The reduction of natural land cover — forests, grasslands and wetlands — is expected to come from development of current farmland and increased urban development.
In addition to pointing out the disparities, the modeling found “mismatches” between where environmental benefits are needed and where they’re expected to happen.
For example, rural areas are expected to face the largest decrease in natural crop pollinators. Urban counties, where the most population growth is expected, are projected to experience significant declines in air quality and insect disease control.
Most of the previous research on how land use impacts people has compared geographic regions, not social factors such as race or class.
“I think that type of measurement can often mask these inequitable trends where we see differences among socioeconomic and demographic groups,” researcher Jesse Gourevitch said in a UVM panel discussion March 3.
Aristizábal said this is the first nationwide study of this kind. This study found no noticeable differences in environmental impacts among regions, even in regions with very different climates.
Aristizábal said she hopes research like this can help inform large-scale planning decisions, such as where to place pollution-causing industries.
“In the past 20 years that we’ve studied ecosystem services, we do spatial assumptions and do every analysis just based on regions, but we don’t take into consideration who is in that region,” she said. “Like, who’s actually benefiting from this, to make more equitable land policies?”
Other research shows Black and Hispanic populations in the U.S. are already exposed to disproportionate amounts of air pollution.
“Our results do not imply that the U.S. is moving from an equitable baseline to an inequitable future. Instead, such inequities are assumed to be present and, in part, likely underpin the disparities projected here,” the study stated. “Our findings raise concerns that, if left unattended, these environmental inequalities will persist and worsen over the next century.”
