Chicago’s Cumulative Impact Assessment last year found that Austin, East Garfield Park, West Garfield Park and North Lawndale communities are among the areas disproportionately impacted by higher heat-related illnesses, industry pollution, increased amounts of ground level ozone and particulate matter, flooding, lack of green space, higher density of buildings and pavement and historic disinvestment.
Those combined environmental hazards play a role in the life-expectancy gap between Black and white Chicagoans. Studies show on average, Black Chicagoans live 8.8 fewer years than white Chicagoans.
Austin Weekly News spoke with area leaders about how they’ll work to fix the problem. AWN spoke with Chicago Department of Public Health, which spearheaded the study along with the Office of Climate and Environmental Equity and other community partners, to determine actions that mitigate what many researchers and climate and community activists call environmental injustice. AWN also interviewed The West Side Long Term Recovery Group, a coalition of neighbors, nonprofits and disaster relief agencies working to address extreme weather events.
Grace V. Johnson Adams, spokesperson with the Chicago Department of Public Health
Johnson Adams said that several actions have been taken since the report was released last September.
“For example,” Johnson Adams said, “one Environmental Justice Action Plan tactic called for at least 5,000 trees to be planted per year in targeted communities using tree canopy data, and 78% of trees planted in 2023 in the arterial tree planting program were in priority areas.”
Other actions, such as the development and implementation of a data collection strategy that reports on the effectiveness of community engagement activities, also have been taken, Johnson Adams said.
Other measures that have not yet begun will be completed per the Environmental Justice Action Plan, according to Johnson Adams.
What is the Environmental Justice Action Plan?
The Environmental Justice Action Plan came out of the 2023 work and is intended to the change the city’s practices and policies to ensure that justice and equity principles are embedded in daily decision-making.
Among the priorities are a community air monitoring network strategy led by the Department of Health and community partners, including Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, Center for Neighborhood Technology and the UIC School of Public Health’s Environmental and Occupational Health Science. It will focus on neighborhoods disproportionately impacted by environmental hazards.
Last summer, researchers and local community members also began collecting the data needed to characterize heat vulnerabilities through Chicago’s Heat Watch 2023 initiative as part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Heat Watch Campaign, which aims to help cities across the U.S. identify specific neighborhoods where heat-mitigating interventions could save lives.
Officials will be developing heat vulnerability tools that function at both the community and clinical levels,” Johnson Adams said. The community tool will be used by the city’s emergency management officials in both emergency prevention/response and long-term mitigation contexts. The clinical tool will be used at the doctor-patient level to identify and protect at-risk individuals.
The West Side Long Term Recovery Group
Justin L. Hill, a research and policy analyst with the Westside Health Authority who also works with the Long Term Recovery Group, said he reviewed the findings in the impact study that talked about the overburdening environmental injustices around Austin, Garfield Park, and the West Side in general, and that the Long Term Recovery Group is embarking on a mission to help homeowners who suffered from the floods.
“On the West Side, a lot of the homeowners experienced a flood that happened last July that completely flooded a lot of basements,” Hill said. “Over 16,000 people were impacted based on the data we received from FEMA. So, we’ve been doing assessments in people’s homes and looking at the impact of mold. The Long Term Recovery Group remains in partnership with FEMA and other agencies, to really think about how floods and other natural disasters impact the health outcomes of people. For the last nine to 10 months, we’ve been working with over 250 homeowners to get the mold out of their basements.”
Hill added that The Long Term Recovery Group members have tried to organize a meeting with Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson regarding the flooding issues.
“We talked to [Illinois] State Rep. LaShawn Ford and 37th Ward Ald. Emma Mitts,” he said. “We’ve been organizing to really deal with the impact of the flooding in particular, but also some of the extenuating and exacerbating ways the impact of water in your basement, and the health outcomes of mold exposure and try to clean some of these houses out and removing anything that’s affected with mold. We found that some people may have been exposed to asbestos, some people still had some lead paint issues.”
In terms of addressing the other kinds of environmental pollutants, heat zones and industrial pollution, identified in the study, Hill said the Recovery Group is also exploring preventative measures.
The post What’s next for Chicago’s promised environmental hazard response plan? appeared first on Austin Weekly News.
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May 20, 2024 at 02:47PM
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