How do we actually study environmental (in)justice?

Environmental justice (EJ) has become a key concept for understanding the connection between environmental problems and social inequalities. It asks a simple but demanding set of questions: who bears the risks, who enjoys the benefits, and who gets a say?

In the United States, environmental justice (EJ) emerged in the 1980s at the intersection of environmentalism and civil rights movements. Communities, largely Black and low-income, began to challenge the siting of hazardous waste facilities and toxic industries in their neighborhoods. From there, EJ has travelled far. Today, global movements mobilize around environmental racism, climate justice, and land rights, and the concept appears in debates about everything from heatwaves and floods to access to green space and clear water. In research and policy, EJ is now widely used to analyze who lives with pollution, who faces climate extremes, who loses land to mining, infrastructure, or conservation, and whose knowledge shapes environmental decisions^1,2.

Although EJ has apparently gained prominence, we were interested in tracking how the study of EJ may have evolved over time in terms of the methods and approaches used.

How is environmental (in)justice actually being measured in empirical research?

What do these choices of methods mean for what we see and what we overlook?

A recent paper in iScience by Jacqueline Loos and colleagues takes these questions as its starting point and offers a systematic look at the field. The authors review 421 empirical studies on environmental (in)justice globally³.

How the review was conducted

Loos et al. conducted a systematic review of the EJ literature using the Scopus database.  To be included, studies had to be peer-reviewed and written in English, explicitly refer to environmental justice or closely related concepts, present empirical case study work, and describe their methods, tools, or assessments³. Out of 730 initial records, 421 articles published between 1997 and 2025 met these criteria.

For each study, the team coded how the research was designed, whether it was quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods, and what kinds of sampling, data collection, and analysis were used. They recorded whether authors relied on GIS and remote sensing, secondary datasets, surveys, interviews, ethnography, participatory methods, or combinations of these, whether they analyzed their material with spatial statistics, descriptive or multivariate models, qualitative coding, or content analysis. They also noted which justice dimensions were addressed explicitly (distributive, procedural, recognition and others), which regions and scales the studies covered, and which actors appeared in the analysis, from community groups and so-called “vulnerable” populations to institutions, experts and private sector actors³.

To see broader patterns in content, they then used text analysis to group the articles into eight thematic clusters – governance, pollution, climate change, health, waste, access, collaboration, and green space – based on how the language was used across the papers.

The goal was not to score individual studies, but to produce a kind of methodological map of how environmental (in)justice is currently studied. 

What the review reveals

Rapid growth – but still a Northern bias

One clear finding is that environmental justice research has expanded rapidly. Empirical EJ case studies have grown markedly over the past 25 years, now spanning 190 journals and multiple disciplines³. However, this expansion is unevenly distributed. Most of the 421 studies are set in North Africa (with a strong focus on the United States) and Europe. A smaller number is based in Asia, while only a few studies focus on the African context. Global or multi-continent comparisons remain the exception rather than the rule. This pattern echoes previous observations that, despite strong EJ mobilizations in many parts of the Global South, the peer-reviewed literature remains geographically skewed towards the Global North ^2,4.

Most studies also look at local or regional scales and cover relatively short time periods. As a result, slow processes and intergenerational justice issues, which are central to many EJ struggles, are less visible in the empirical record captured by this review.  

Methods: dominance of quantitative and spatial tools

The methodological picture is equally clear. Across the dataset, quantitative and spatial methods dominate. Many studies rely on GIS and remote sensing, together with secondary data such as census records, emissioninventories or health statistics. Spatial and basic statistical analyses are the primary tools for visualizing inequalities in exposure to pollution or access to environmental amenities³. These methods have been critical for showing that certain groups consistently face higher levels of risk and lower levels of environmental protection.

Qualitative approaches, including interviews, focus groups, ethnographic works, as well as participatory methods that directly involve communities in generating and interpreting data, appear far less frequently. Research designs that are explicitly multi- or transdisciplinary, or that build long-term collaborations with local actors, are present but clearly in the minority.

Justice dimensions: distribution at the centre

Perhaps the most distinctive contribution of the paper lies in its analysis of justice dimensions. Here, distributive justice is clearly at the centre. Most of the reviewed studies explicitly analyse who experiences environmental harms and who receives environmental benefits, particularly in the pollution, waste and health clusters³. Procedural justice—how decisions are made and who participates—and recognition justice—whose identities, values and knowledges are acknowledged—are much less often the primary focus. Only a relatively small subset of studies engages explicitly with multiple justice dimensions at once.

The connection between methods and justice dimensions is striking. Quantitative, GIS-based studies are closely associated with distributive justice. Interview-based, qualitative, and participatory work more often addresses procedural or recognition questions. This suggests that definitions of justice and methodological choices tend to reinforce one another: when justice is framed as a question of distribution, spatial and statistical methods come to the fore; when it is framed as a question of participation or recognition, other tools are used.

Thematic clusters: From harms to responses, from risks to opportunities

The eight thematic clusters add another layer. Studies on pollution and health typically combine quantitative, spatial methods with a focus on distribution. Studies on governance and collaboration more often rely on qualitative and participatory approaches and engage with procedural, recognition, and institutional aspects of justice. Across these clusters, the authors see two gradual shifts: from diagnosing harms, such as pollution and waste, towards examining responses, such as governance arrangements and collaborative initiatives; and from concentrating mainly on risks and burdens towards also analyzing access to environmental opportunities, like green space³. The field, in other words, is diversifying, but not evenly.

So, what does this mean for environmental justice research?

 Methods and justice concepts co-evolve.

Methodological diversity matters.

Quantitative and spatial approaches are essential for documenting environmental inequalities and informing policy. At the same time, if they dominate, other crucial dimensions of justice—recognition, procedural fairness, or capabilities—risk being underexplored. A broader mix of methods, including qualitative, participatory and mixed-methods designs, is likely to better reflect the range of environmental justice concerns described in theory and articulated by movements¹.

Geographical coverage remains limited.

The strong focus on North America and Europe suggests substantial scope to expand empirical EJ research in regions where conflicts and grassroots environmentalism are well documented but less represented in indexed journals, particularly in the Global South^2,4.

More explicit links between justice dimensions and methods.

In many studies, procedural or recognition issues appear in the background— mentioned in interviews, narratives, or institutional descriptions—but are not framed as justice dimensions in their own right. Designing research that deliberately connects spatial patterns with lived experience, institutional analysis, and historical context, often through mixed-methods work, could make these links clearer and more useful for practice.

Rather than prescribing a single ideal methodology, the paper invites researchers to be more explicit about why they choose particular methods, which justice dimensions these methods foreground, and where their limitations lie. It also points to the value of collaboration across disciplines and with practitioners and communities.

In this sense, the paper is less a critique of individual studies and more an invitation to reflect openly on methodological choices and their implications for how we understand environmental (in)justice.

Limitations: recognising movements beyond the literature

The 421 studies analyzed here can only represent a part of the broader environmental justice landscape. As with any literature-based review, this study is shaped by its inclusion criteria. It covers only empirical work that is published in peer-reviewed journals, indexed in a major bibliographic database, written in English, andframed explicitly in terms of environmental justice or closely related concepts. While these criteria ensure transparency and reproducibility, they also exclude certain perspectives of environmental justice thinking and practice from the analysis.

Most notably, the review can capture only part of the diversity of environmental justice movements themselves. Around the world, groups are mobilizing against industrial pollution, land dispossession, water access issues, urban displacement, conservation conflicts, and many other related problems. In doing so, they generate their own forms of knowledge, such as community maps, local monitoring data, reports, pamphlets, murals, slogans, songs, banners, documentary films, and social media content in many languages. Much of this material is not translated, archived, or published in academic journals, and therefore does not appear in database searches.

There are conceptual limitations as well. The review works with predefined categories for justice dimensions, methods, actors, and themes. This enables systematic comparison, but may simplify context-specific understandings of justice or local methodological innovations that do not fit standard labels. Moreover, coding also depends on how authors describe their work; aspects that are implicit or framed in different terminology are more difficult to detect.

Within these boundaries, the study offers a clear, structured overview of how environmental (in)justice is currently studied in a particular segment of the academic literature. Beyond them, it highlights opportunities for future work that engages more directly with movement-generated knowledge, non-English scholarship, diverse publication formats and collaborative research with organizers, artists, filmmakers, and community scholars.

In that sense, the review by Loos et al. functions as both a map and a starting point: it shows where EJ research has been focusing so far – and invites the field to think carefully about where and how it wants to go next.

References:

1. Schlosberg, D. Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature. (Oxford University PressOxford, 2007). doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199286294.001.0001.

2. Martinez-Alier, J. The environmentalism of the poor. Geoforum 54, 239–241 (2014).

3. Loos, J. et al. Measuring environmental (in)justices: Insights from a systematic literature review on methodological approaches. iScience 28, 113889 (2025).

4. Reed, M. G. & George, C. Where in the world is environmental justice? Progress in Human Geography 35, 835–842 (2011).