Papers
Topics
Authors
Recent
Gemini 2.5 Flash
Gemini 2.5 Flash
156 tokens/sec
GPT-4o
7 tokens/sec
Gemini 2.5 Pro Pro
45 tokens/sec
o3 Pro
4 tokens/sec
GPT-4.1 Pro
38 tokens/sec
DeepSeek R1 via Azure Pro
28 tokens/sec
2000 character limit reached

ML4EJ: Decoding the Role of Urban Features in Shaping Environmental Injustice Using Interpretable Machine Learning (2310.02476v1)

Published 3 Oct 2023 in cs.LG

Abstract: Understanding the key factors shaping environmental hazard exposures and their associated environmental injustice issues is vital for formulating equitable policy measures. Traditional perspectives on environmental injustice have primarily focused on the socioeconomic dimensions, often overlooking the influence of heterogeneous urban characteristics. This limited view may obstruct a comprehensive understanding of the complex nature of environmental justice and its relationship with urban design features. To address this gap, this study creates an interpretable machine learning model to examine the effects of various urban features and their non-linear interactions to the exposure disparities of three primary hazards: air pollution, urban heat, and flooding. The analysis trains and tests models with data from six metropolitan counties in the United States using Random Forest and XGBoost. The performance is used to measure the extent to which variations of urban features shape disparities in environmental hazard levels. In addition, the analysis of feature importance reveals features related to social-demographic characteristics as the most prominent urban features that shape hazard extent. Features related to infrastructure distribution and land cover are relatively important for urban heat and air pollution exposure respectively. Moreover, we evaluate the models' transferability across different regions and hazards. The results highlight limited transferability, underscoring the intricate differences among hazards and regions and the way in which urban features shape hazard exposures. The insights gleaned from this study offer fresh perspectives on the relationship among urban features and their interplay with environmental hazard exposure disparities, informing the development of more integrated urban design policies to enhance social equity and environmental injustice issues.

Definition Search Book Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com
References (43)
  1. Unbreakable: building the resilience of the poor in the face of natural disasters. World Bank Publications, 2016.
  2. Collision of environmental injustice and sea level rise: Assessment of risk inequality in flood-induced pollutant dispersion from toxic sites in texas. arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.00312, 2023a.
  3. Julie Elkins Watson. Beyond Cooperation: Environmental Justice in Transboundary Water Management. Oregon State University. Ph.D. Dissertation., 2015.
  4. Tracing and building up environmental justice considerations in the urban ecosystem service literature: A systematic review. Landscape and urban planning, 214:104130, 2021.
  5. Edward W Soja. Seeking spatial justice, volume 16. U of Minnesota Press, 2013.
  6. The (in) visible victims of disaster: Understanding the vulnerability of undocumented latino/a and indigenous immigrants. Geoforum, 116:50–62, 2020.
  7. Laura Pulido. Rethinking environmental racism: White privilege and urban development in southern california. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90(1):12–40, 2000. URL https://doi.org/10.1111/0004-5608.00182.
  8. The ecological and evolutionary consequences of systemic racism in urban environments. Science, 369(6510):eaay4497, 2020. URL https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aay4497.
  9. Environmental justice implications of urban tree cover in miami-dade county, florida. Environmental Justice, 4(2):125–134, 2011. URL https://doi.org/10.1089/env.2010.0018.
  10. An integrated resilience assessment model of urban transportation network: A case study of 40 cities in china. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 173:103687, 2023. URL https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0965856423001076.
  11. Beyond residence: A mobility-based approach for improved evaluation of human exposure to environmental hazards, 2023, arXiv preprint arXiv: 2306.10197 [stat.AP].
  12. Climate change and environmental injustice in a bi-national context. Applied Geography, 33:25–35, 2012. ISSN 0143-6228. URL https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0143622811000968. The Health Impacts of Global Climate Change: A Geographic Perspective.
  13. Urban green space, public health, and environmental justice: The challenge of making cities ‘just green enough’. Landscape and Urban Planning, 125:234–244, 2014. ISSN 0169-2046. URL https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169204614000310.
  14. Fine particle concentrations in buses and taxis in florence, italy. Atmospheric Environment, 42(35):8185–8193, 2008.
  15. Socioeconomic disparities in cooling and warming efficiencies of urban vegetation and impervious surfaces. Sustainable Cities and Society, 92:104464, 2023. ISSN 2210-6707. URL https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2210670723000756.
  16. Identifying the impact of the built environment on flood damage in texas. Disasters, 32(1):1–18, 2008.
  17. Social vulnerability to climate change: a review of concepts and evidence. Regional Environmental Change, 17:1651–1662, 2017. URL https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:157990535.
  18. Graph attention networks unveil determinants of intra- and inter-city health disparity, 2022, arXiv preprint arXiv: 2210.10142 [cs.LG].
  19. Environmental injustice in north carolina’s hog industry. Environmental Health Perspectives, 108(3):225–231, 2000. URL https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/abs/10.1289/ehp.00108225.
  20. City structure, obesity, and environmental justice: An integrated analysis of physical and social barriers to walkable streets and park access. Social science & medicine, 69(9):1314–1322, 2009.
  21. Deep learning analysis of street panorama images to evaluate the streetscape walkability of neighborhoods for subsidized families in seoul, korea. Landscape and Urban Planning, 230:104631, 2023. ISSN 0169-2046. URL https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169204622002808.
  22. Quantification through deep learning of sky view factor and greenery on urban streets during hot and cool seasons. Landscape and Urban Planning, 232:104679, 2023. ISSN 0169-2046. URL https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169204622003280.
  23. Built environment issues in unserved and underserved african-american neighborhoods in north carolina. Environmental Justice, 1(2):63–72, 2008. URL https://doi.org/10.1089/env.2008.0509.
  24. Annual maps of global artificial impervious area (gaia) between 1985 and 2018. Remote Sensing of Environment, 236:111510, 2020. ISSN 0034-4257. URL https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034425719305292.
  25. Effects of the spatial configuration of trees on urban heat mitigation: A comparative study. Remote Sensing of Environment, 195:1–12, 2017. ISSN 0034-4257. URL https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034425717301463.
  26. Environmental equity: the demographics of dumping. Demography, 31(2):229–248, 1994.
  27. Which came first? toxic facilities, minority move-in, and environmental justice. Journal of urban affairs, 23(1):1–21, 2001.
  28. Unequal trajectories: Racial and class differences in residential exposure to industrial hazard. Social Forces, 92(3):1189–1215, 2014.
  29. Separate and unequal: residential segregation and estimated cancer risks associated with ambient air toxics in us metropolitan areas. Environmental health perspectives, 114(3):386–393, 2006.
  30. A gis–environmental justice analysis of particulate air pollution in hamilton, canada. Environment and Planning A, 33(6):955–973, 2001.
  31. Climate change mitigation, air pollution, and environmental justice in california. Environmental science & technology, 52(18):10829–10838, 2018.
  32. Network approach reveals the spatiotemporal influence of traffic on air pollution under COVID-19. Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, 32(4):041106, 04 2022. URL https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0087844.
  33. First Street Foundation. First street foundation data access - frequently asked questions, 07 2023. URL https://firststreet.org/data-access/getting-started-with-first-street-data/data-faqs/.
  34. First Street Foundation. First street foundation releases new data disclosing flood risk of every u.s. home, 06 2020. URL https://firststreet.org/press/2020-first-street-foundation-flood-model-launch/.
  35. Mapping urban risk: Flood hazards, race, & environmental justice in new york. Applied geography, 29(1):111–124, 2009.
  36. Social and spatial inequities in exposure to flood risk in miami, florida. Natural Hazards Review, 15(3):04014006, 2014.
  37. Elev-vision: Automated lowest floor elevation estimation from segmenting street view images, 2023, arXiv preprint arXiv: 2306.03050 [cs.CV].
  38. Interpretable machine learning learns complex interactions of urban features to understand socio-economic inequality. Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering, 00:1–17, 2023. URL https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/mice.12972.
  39. Recommending attractive thematic regions by semantic community detection with multi-sourced vgi data. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 33(8):1520–1544, 2019.
  40. Regnet: a neural network model for predicting regional desirability with vgi data. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 35(1):175–192, 2021.
  41. Decoding urban-health nexus: Interpretable machine learning illuminates cancer prevalence based on intertwined city features, 2023b, arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.11847 [cs.LG].
  42. Why do tree-based models still outperform deep learning on typical tabular data? In S. Koyejo, S. Mohamed, A. Agarwal, D. Belgrave, K. Cho, and A. Oh, editors, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, volume 35, pages 507–520. Curran Associates, Inc., 2022. URL https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2022/file/0378c7692da36807bdec87ab043cdadc-Paper-Datasets_and_Benchmarks.pdf.
  43. Assessing potential risk of heavy metal exposure from consumption of home-produced vegetables by urban populations. Environmental health perspectives, 112(2):215–221, 2004.
Citations (1)
View on Semantic Scholar

Summary

We haven't generated a summary for this paper yet.

Ai Sparkles Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com Summarize Now