Mapping Environmental Health Injustice for Sustainable Urban Ecologies Using Gis Based Techniques. I

Abstract

Issues of environmental concern especially health injustice, arising from urbanization, are becoming increasingly important due to social activism and health problems associated with noxious land uses. In Kenya, proximity of open dumpsites to residential areas is a basic form of environmental health injustice due to toxic gas exposure, waste smoke plumes and olfactory nuisance. Environmental risk assessment and equity analysis were carried out in Chuka town as a case study. GIS based techniques of land use refinement method and dispersal modeling was applied to estimate the population at exposure risk to the toxic waste smoke. Over 25% of sampled people were at high exposure, especially those living along smoke plume dispersion route within hospital area, Ndagani and Rukindu. The exposure risks showed spatial variations regarding prevailing land use, while direction and speed of wind flow varied on a temporal scale. Subpopulations had similar socio-economic characteristics and were often disadvantaged compared to the reference population. These results were consistent with findings of related studies in the USA which found that the location of most noxious facilities especially wastes landfills was often in the neighbourhoods of the minority poor urban immigrant subpopulations. There is a need to relocate the current dumpsite to a suitably mapped less populated blocks and actively engage affected communities in finding sustainable solutions to rising problem of environmental health injustice.