Equitable Access to Nature: Assessing Environmental Social Services In Connecticut
Lucy Hendrickson, Yogesh Kumar, Steven Matile
Objectives
Many communities within the state of Connecticut, especially urban or environmental social justice communities, have limited access to green spaces, urban agriculture, or open water for recreation and fishing. These benefits of access to nature fall under the umbrella of environmental social services, which are services which integrate or enhance the natural environment to provide recreational, social, or provisioning services to benefit local communities.
The goal of the project is to create map showing the spatial distribution of environmental social services in Connecticut. This map will provide benefits to both community residents and municipalities. Residents will benefit from increased equity and availability of environmental social services, while municipalities will benefit from a comprehensive and easily referable tool that simplifies creating equitable guidelines for policymakers and upholding the principles of affordability and environmental justice in future projects. It will also increase the competitiveness of grant applications by locating areas with reduced access to the environment, or by siting housing projects and infrastructure in areas with increased access to the environment.
A paper on this project will also be written and submitted to a journal for publication. We use spatial and statistical analyses to address the following questions:
- What environmental social services exist within Connecticut?
- Where are these environmental social services located?
- Are environmental social services less likely to be present in environmental social justice communities?
Methods
The research questions and datasets selected were informed by a series of stakeholder meetings. We met with municipal representatives, housing nonprofit organizations, and regional state government representatives.
To evaluate the spatial distribution of environmental social services in CT and the accessibility of nature to environmental social justice communities, we used Arc-GIS to analyze relevant, publicly available, data sets, and then performed statistical analyses to generate correlations between census data and the environmental social services available within a given census block group. The final output is a choropleth map which scores each census block group by the availability of environmental social services within or on its borders. This map can be used by municipal planners to identify areas within their town where access to nature is lacking or could be improved.
Our analysis steps are:
- Interviewing stakeholders to determine which environmental social services they prioritize.
- Collecting and visualizing data, and performing qualitative spatial analysis.
- Performing statistical analyses to quantify relationships between the datasets.
We also developed a survey, sent to municipal leaders and nonprofits, to determine how communities and municipalities use and prioritize their environmental social services. This allowed us to collect data from across the state, and avoid potential bias from interviewing a limited subset of representatives. The survey results will be used to inform the relative importance of each type of environmental social service to communities.
Progress
We have met with stakeholders and experts from nonprofits, municipalities, regional state governments, and academia. We have compiled and analyzed 7 datasets and combined them into a single map which quantifies the access to nature in each census block group within the state of Connecticut. Our datasets include public coastal access locations, boat launches maintained by Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, trout stocked streams, enhanced shore fishing locations, parks, open space, and environmental hazards such as waters designated by Connecticut as impaired for fishing or recreation.
We are currently conducting statistical analyses on our data. These include autospatial correlation to quantify the distribution of access to nature, and correlation between access and census data to quantify the availability of nature to environmental social justice communities.
We plan to publish a paper on our work, and we hope to submit our map for hosting on the Open Community Alliance website with their other work.