  According to environmental justice, environmental degradation and benefits
should not be disproportionately shared between communities. Identifying
disparities in the spatial distribution of environmental degradation is
therefore a prerequisite for validating the state of environmental justice in a
geographic region. Under ideal circumstances, environmental risk assessment is
a preferred metric, but only when exposure levels have been quantified reliably
after estimating the risk. In this study, we adopt a proximity burden metric
caused by adjacent hazardous sources, allowing us to evaluate the environmental
burden distribution and vulnerability to pollution sources. In close
collaboration with a predominantly Latinx community in Chicago, we highlight
the usefulness of our approach through a case study that shows how certain
community areas in the city are likely to bear a disproportionate burden of
environmental pollution caused by industrial roads.
