Frontiers of environmental justice research and its enlightenment

Environmental justice is a major practical issue. Thus, it is the research focus in different disciplines and fields. The paper reviews and comparatively analyzes the disciplines, contents and methods of environmental justice on the basis of combing a large number of important domestic literatures of environmental justice. The findings are as follows: Firstly, although domestic environmental justice research has shown a trend of multi-disciplinary perspectives, diversified themes and interdisciplinary fields, subject participation is still weak and the research system is not perfect due to lack of the theoretical innovation. It is urgent to build a theoretical system and analytical framework for environmental justice with Chinese characteristics and summarize the best practices and solutions in China. Secondly, there are several concepts related environmental justice lacking a unified and clear definition, which need to be further clarified and distinguished. The comprehensive understanding of environmental justice should consider multi-dimensional connotation, multiple dimensions and multi-dimensional principles and construct and improve the conceptual system of environmental justice. Thirdly, environmental injustice is mainly reflected in multi-scale areas and multi-type groups. The unequal environmental rights and responsibilities of various types of environmentally strong groups (regions) and vulnerable groups (regions) are the focus. Environmental injustice of urban-rural areas, especially in areas and groups between city and country and groups within villages, has attracted much attention. It is necessary to combine regional and colonial environmental injustice and strengthen environmental justice research of economic and environmentally disadvantaged areas. Fourthly, the research on policy measures of environmental justice mainly focuses on the theoretical level with a framework, ideas, and perspectives, which lack systematic consideration, operability, pertinence and sufficient connection between theory and practice. The key point is to explore environmental justice and its solutions in specific social, cultural and local contexts. According to the priority of the problem, we should gradually eliminate environmental injustices in different regions and groups. Fifthly, environmental justice evaluation standards are lacking, and data and methods from different disciplines are insufficiently integrated. The focus and difficulty of future environmental justice research is to construct a problem-oriented, interdisciplinary, and intersecting environmental justice theoretical framework, accurately characterize and measure environmental (in)justice, simulate the evolution of multi-scale and multi-subject environmental justice, and strengthen typical case studies of environmental justice based on locality.