Assessing population at risk

This chapter provides a description and comparison of techniques used to estimate population counts and socio-demographic characteristics in areas potentially impacted by environmental and other hazards, or to ascertain which populations do not have adequate access to health-promoting land uses and facilities. These techniques can be used to facilitate environmental justice and health equity analyses. Environmental impacts are often spatially represented by discrete bounded areas (e.g. circular, plume, or network buffers) or continuous surfaces (e.g. outputs from dispersion modelling or land use regression). The chapter examines and compares the relative merits of methods including spatial coincidence/selection (such as centroid containment), and disaggregation techniques (such as areal interpolation, filtered areal weighting, and cadastral-based dasymetric mapping), using an example of a potentially impacted population living near a controversially sited waste water treatment plant in Harlem, New York.

Environmental health · Population · Global Public Health Policies and Epidemiology · Health and Conflict Studies · HIV/AIDS Impact and Responses · Medicine