Measuring Corporate Environmental Justice Performance

Michael Ash, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
James K. Boyce, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

Abstract

Measures of corporate environmental justice performance can be a valuable tool in eorts to promote corporate social responsibility and to document systematic patterns of environmental injustice. This paper develops such a measure based on the extent to which toxic air emissions from industrial facilities disproportionately impact racial and ethnic minorities and low-income people. Applying the measure to 100 major corporate air polluters in the United States, we find wide variation in the extent of disproportional exposures. In a number of cases, minorities bear more than half of the total human health impacts from the firm's industrial air pollution.