COVID-19 Impact Linked to Environmental Racism

Evidence is indisputable that COVID-19 has had a disproportionate impact on communities of color, and one important, often overlooked cause is longstanding environmental policies that result in people of color being hardest hit by environmental problems.

“The overarching issue is that of environmental racism,” said Michele Roberts, the national co-coordinator of the Environmental Justice Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform (EJHA) and contributor to Life at the Fenceline: Understanding Cumulative Health Hazards in Environmental Justice Communities, a report that found that people who live within three miles of a hazardous facility are disproportionately Black, Latinx, and impoverished. “This is the ultimate perfect storm. So what is happening with COVID-19 is not a surprise. We have high rates of cancer and heart disease in communities of color and a compromised health system.”

Although there are laws and policies that should protect everyone from air and water pollution, they have not been enforced equally. Communities of color are still more likely to be exposed to air pollution, which is an important contributor to pre-existing health conditions, said Vijay Limaye, climate and health scientist at Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and co-author of the NRDC report EPA Non-Enforcement Policy Endangers Millions. The Clean Air Act of 1970, the federal law to prevent air pollution, requires the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate emissions of pollutants. It has been largely successful, said Limaye, yet communities of color are still “more likely to be exposed to air pollution, which contributes to dangerous health problems such as heart and lung disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, chronic inflammation, and Type 2 diabetes. All of these conditions are listed by the CDC as risk factors for severe complications from COVID-19.” Limaye also points out that the Clean Air Act takes a “piecemeal approach to regulating pollutants and not a cumulative approach ​of regulating all of the environmental stressors that people experience, like looking at urban areas and the combination of simultaneous exposures to extreme heat risks and multiple air pollutants. If you only look at one piece of the puzzle, it doesn’t tell the whole story of the impacts of ​multiple environmental stressors like air pollution.”

Until the Trump administration, air pollution levels had been declining overall, but remaining elevated in low-income and communities of color. “We got here through a lot of different ways,” said Ana Isabel Baptista, chair of the Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management Program at the New School and board member of the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance. “The existing laws around air and water and brownfields have not protected communities of color. The good news is that we can demonstrate this with decades of empirical evidence that show pollution causes health problems but this has not stopped communities of color from being in close proximity to hazardous waste facilities. Many of these communities are politically disenfranchised and don’t have the clout to keep hazardous industries out of their neighborhoods. These basic necessities of life, clean air and clean water, are things we’ve always needed. But in a pandemic, they become the difference between life and death.”

Redlining and racist urban development policies allowed highways to be built in Black neighborhoods and caused “bulldozing through communities,” said Victoria Paykar, Oregon transportation policy manager at Climate Solutions, a Northwest-based clean energy advocacy organization, and author of Connecting the Dots: COVID-19 and Environmental Racism. “You have a city that is mapped out by racial divides in combination with the Federal Highway Act leading to hazardous air pollution being disproportionately emitted in BIPOC communities. The message during COVID has been to stay at home, with the assumption that everyone has things like a house and access to clean drinking water, but that is not the case, leaving those folks more vulnerable than before. It’s not on accident that hazardous waste facilities and highways have been built in Black neighborhoods. This is a contributor to disparate health problems affecting BIPOC, it’s not a predisposition in our genes.”

Despite the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act, which was supposed to ensure safe drinking water for everyone, nearly 40% of the U.S. population get their water from drinking systems that are in violation of the law, according to data from Watered Down Justice, a 2019 report from NRDC, Coming Clean, and EJHA. Health threats from these violations include cancer and impaired brain development, and the study found higher levels of violations in counties where people of color, low-income people, and non-native English speakers live. “If your trust in the safety of the water coming out of your tap has been eroded, the water that should keep you healthy also can become a source of fear and discomfort,” said Kristi Pullen Fedinick, director of science and data at NRDC and co-author of Watered Down Justice and another NRDC report, COVID in Context: Lead in the Water. “The COVID crises has made a lack of clean, safe drinking water even more dire for many communities across the country. The disproportionate impacts we are seeing echo those seen across a wide range of adverse health outcomes like cardiovascular disease, cancer, and all-cause mortality.” Certain cities, such as Newark and Flint, have well-documented high levels of lead in the water which overlap with high rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths, according to COVID in Context.

“African Americans are twice as likely as white people to live in a home with substandard plumbing, without potable water or modern sanitation facilities,” said Kineta Sealey, policy counsel at Black Women’s Health Imperative. “The ongoing water contamination problems are much more prevalent in communities of color and in the middle of a pandemic moves beyond being a public health issue to a human rights issue. It is more important than ever that we vote to elect public officials who reflect our values and support our issues.”

The EPA has been rolling back standards since the beginning of the Trump presidency, leading to rising air pollution levels. On April 30, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler announced plans to keep the nation’s soot pollution levels where they are, despite research showing that exposure to air pollution contributes to COVID-19 mortality as well as evidence from the EPA’s own scientists that soot pollution is linked to 50,000 early deaths each year. “This administration would like to close its eyes to the fact that there is no safe level” of soot pollution, said Limaye. “The CDC also has a role to play here with their appallingly incomplete racial picture of COVID deaths. We shouldn’t have public health officials dragging their feet when it comes to collecting and reporting timely and detailed data. The EPA has issued a free pass to polluters. And while there has been a lot of publicity about the importance of hand-washing and wearing masks and social distancing, we haven’t had enough attention on the problem​s of lack of access to medical care, environmental contamination, and underserved areas — food deserts — that contribute to poor nutrition, which makes people more vulnerable. But accessing healthy food and even health care when you are unemployed is a huge issue which needs to be addressed.”

Houston, one of the places with such high rates of infections that officials are considering re-instituting lock-downs, has an “overconcentration of environmental hazards” in communities of color and “is the poster child of environmental racism,” said Bakeyah S. Nelson, executive director of Air Alliance Houston. “Maps that illustrate where people of color live and where there is a disproportionate concentration of hazardous facilities present painful evidence that the lives in these communities do not matter. Even in the absence of formal zoning policies like we see in other cities, Houston has done a remarkable job of perpetuating housing segregation by race and income through practices like redlining and deed restrictions. An analysis by the University of Texas Health Center found that neighborhoods close to industrial facilities in Harris County are at higher risk for hospitalization and intensive care needs due to COVID-19. These neighborhoods are also already at higher risk for cancer, respiratory illnesses, and a slate of other health conditions. This is not a coincidence.”

In addition to environmental racism, racial inequality has meant that communities of color are more likely to face the “cumulative stress of multiple risk factors that put them ​at increased overall risk [of COVID-19], including lack of access to medical care, densely populated living conditions, types of jobs,” said Limaye.

The pandemic in combination with the Black Lives Matter protests this summer has put this country’s continuing history of racism and environmental racism under a renewed spotlight. “This gets back to the origins of ‘I can’t breathe’: the industrial revolution,” said Roberts. “The industrial revolution came in on the heels of this country’s most racist period, slavery, and all the ‘legal’ racist egregious activities impacting communities of color, Native Indigenous, and the poor. We continue to tell people, ‘I can’t breathe,’ but nobody listens. The good news is people continue to mobilize to fight against the impacts of environmental racism. And beyond all of that, the light for us is we do have solutions.”