Environmental justice in South Yorkshire: locating social deprivation and poor environments using multiple indicators

This paper reports on a study commissioned by the Environment Agency to determine the spatial pattern of environmental inequality in South Yorkshire. GIS was used to correlate a range of environmental variables against socio-economic data sets, to quantify multiple impacts and thus identify hot spots of poor environmental quality. A new measure known as an Impact Intensity Score was developed to quantify multiple impacts and this measure would be transferable to other studies. This study provides evidence of inequality between different social groups in South Yorkshire with regard to environmental quality. In general, deprived areas have poorer environmental quality and in particular the most deprived areas often have the poorest environments in South Yorkshire. As such, it fits in with an emerging body of environmental justice work across Europe which has found links between deprived populations and poor environmental quality.