Equity and the Environment: What’s the connection?

Lecture

Speaker(s)

Rachel Morello-Frosch

Professor; Environmental Science, Policy, and Management; School of Public Health
University of California, Berkeley

Rachel Morello-Frosch is a professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management in UC Berkeley's School of Public Health. Her research focuses on environmental health and environmental justice, and she is particularly interested in addressing the double jeopardy faced by communities of color and the poor who experience high exposures to environmental hazards and who are more vulnerable to the toxic effects of pollution due to poverty, malnutrition, discrimination, and underlying health conditions. How do matters of race and class affect distributions of health risks in the United States? What are the causes and consequences of environmental disparities and health inequalities? How can research create "upstream" opportunities for intervention and prevention? She am also interested in evaluating the influence of community participation on environmental health research, science, regulation, and policy-making, as well as in developing methods to foster community-based participatory research.

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

This lecture was presented at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) on April 24, 2018, as part of the Berkeley Distinguished Lectures in Data Science. (Note: Due to an equipment error, the first few seconds of this video are missing.  Our apologies for the inconvenience.)

Emerging research indicates that more unequal societies have more polluted and degraded environments, perhaps also helping to explain why more unequal societies are often less healthy. A lack of “environmental justice”—that is, a situation in which people of color and the poor are disproportionately exposed to harmful pollution—is seen as potentially having broader impacts on overall pollution levels. This talk will show how data science is being leveraged to examine linkages between social equity and sustainability and the implications of this work for policy.

The Berkeley Distinguished Lectures in Data Science, co-hosted by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) and the Berkeley Division of Data Sciences, feature faculty doing visionary research that illustrates the character of the ongoing data, computational, inferential revolution. All campus community members are welcome and encouraged to attend.  Arrive at 3:30pm for tea, coffee and discussion prior to the formal presentation.

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