Environmental justice and wellbeing in Scotland

Abstract

Environmental justice can be achieved by a fair distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. Environmental discrimination, usually occurs by allocating burdens disproportionately, a fact that affects adversely people's’ mental and physical health, also degrading inhabited areas in a socio-economic aspect. A deprived neighborhood environment might host criminal activities and create a feeling of insecurity to its residents, causing psychological side-effects. Moreover environmental deprivation caused by human activities, could also have a detrimental impact on physical health. Most studies suggest that these occurrences are allocated mostly in deprived, densely populated urban regions. The utilization of area-based indicators, provides us the ability to estimate in brief which places are considered socially, economically and environmentally deprived. The examination of health indicators in the same areas, could assist us estimate the statistical association between the hospital admissions or medical treatment for anxiety depression or psychosis with other detrimental indicators. Also, GIS software facilitates the presentation of clustering and the emphasizing of problematic areas. In national scale, the study’s outputs visualized a disproportionate distribution of burdens, especially on densely populated areas (large urban areas), whilst the explanatory value of the statistical model was rendered weak to explain the variation of values for the examined mental and physical wellbeing factors across the country.

Key words: Environmental, Justice, mental health, wellbeing, physical health, deprivation, Scotland.