ABSTRACT
The racial and ethnic disparities in the distribution of polluting facilities and other environmental hazards result in part from historic zoning practices in the early twentieth century that separated immigrant and African American communities by building tenements and other low-income housing in industrial districts. Today, the processes that result in the concentration of polluting sources in poor, minority communities are neutral on their face. Given the limitations of both antidiscrimination law and environmental regulation, and the difficulty of integrating equality norms into environmental decision making, this chapter suggests that one way to align these two frameworks is through the lens of vulnerability analysis. Vulnerability analysis has been embraced by equality theorists as an alternative to the limitations of antidiscrimination law and by social scientists to analyse and measure the ways that some subpopulations are more susceptible to the harms from climate change and environmental hazard events such as hurricanes and floods.
