Communicating risk to environmental justice communities: Promoting a culturally-fluent, bi-directional conversation enhancing expertise with local knowledge

A CBPR-based risk communication model actively involves EJ communities directly in the design and promotion of site-specific, culturally fluent risk messages. Community members are rich sources of history – industrial practices / emissions (chronic and acute), regulatory efficacy, prior / ongoing health impacts, development, environmental health activist struggles. The community, itself, is the only local knowledge source of important factors in risk characterization such as historical and current exposure pathways, effects of climate events on neighborhood infrastructure and service availability, observation of relationships in patterns of exposure and disease, health disparities, and socio-economic stressors affecting the community: all dimensions of the EJ community's cumulative risk burden. This collaborative model furthers the development of clear, concise, culturally-fluent risk messaging and promotes dissemination by leveraging preexisting community communication networks and open access media formats. Ultimately, this bidirectional methodology promotes active involvement, and extends the depth of interactions among all actors in the risk characterization process. This presentation will focus on planning / implementation of specific communication scenarios with EJ communities in EPA Regions 6 and 4. Scenarios include: 1) hazardous waste disposal / sequestration-treatment issues (dioxin, VX hydrolysate (Port Arthur, TX), RCRA exempt oil exploration / production waste (Grand Boise LA), 2) post-climate disaster risk assessments / safety guidelines: Murphy Oil Spill (Chalmette / Meraux LA), storm surge sediment contamination from legacy compounds (Galveston TX), 3) Deep Water Horizon Disaster: damage to the ecosytem, risks to human health from seafood consumption, (Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama coastal communities). Finally, we will use CBPR values and principles to consider ethical obligations inherent in communicating risk to EJ communities with emphasis on: transparency, process bidirectionality, and considerations of cumulative risk / community vulnerability.