Welcome to the Environmental Data for Health Justice Working Board
January 2024
The purpose of the Environmental Data for Health Justice board is to build confidence in how those seeking structural health justice outcomes through research, campaigns, and other forms of advocacy use data as a language to directly address health injustices and develop strategies for health justice.
Through a variety of tools, exercises, lexicon, frameworks, and insights from case studies and interviews, this board supports both how these people create data from a grassroots level that supports their current campaigns, and how they hold other more macro stakeholders accountable for the way they create and use data related to health injustices.
INTRODUCTION
Data is an important tool and language when seeking structural change for health justice. Institutions rely on the insights formed by data to understand an environment and inform their strategy. Data is often positioned as apolitical and objective information, which is never entirely true because collecting and analysing data takes an investment of time, money, and other resources from at least one stakeholder who will have their own motivations, experiences, and biases.As scientists, we use data to evidence and draw attention to health injustices based on a combination of data collected on populations and locations. This environmental data often fills in the blanks of information that individual people wouldn’t be able to intuit about their environment or community at a large scale. As our reports moved further towards explicitly health justice causes, turning from the simple analysis of health injustices to presenting insights that directly support health justice campaigns, two reflections became clear:
The way data about populations and environments is currently collected and presented often has limitations in how this information can be applied directly for environmental and structural health justice strategies.
Improving the creation and use of environmental data for health justice purposes requires coordination from a wider ecosystem to address the cultural and political obstacles that communities and those with lived experience face when evidencing injustice at the scale that structural change requires.
The current limitations in data about populations and environments for health justice range from a lack of data being collected at the relevant scale or frequency that health justice campaigns require to data being presented in ways that do not reflect important nuances in a location or community.
Improving the creation and use of environmental data for health justice doesn’t just require more nuanced data collection. The process also involves addressing the barriers of accessibility and resources that currently exist when those seeking justice engage with the larger academic, political, legal, health, and professional entities involved. These barriers include who gets funded to collect data, the questions that frame the data, where data is made accessible, how people with lived experiences of phenomena are involved in data collection and investigations at an earlier stage without the risk of gaslighting by more marco stakeholders, and how these macro stakeholders can further amplify the data-related efforts of these communities through the resources at their disposal.
The Interactive Miro
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