Effective use of data for health justice involves being creative in how you approach data as a tool and language. While there is no absolute best practice, it is a practice that we each can develop and learn from each other.

Urban sacrifice zones and red routes are two concepts that demonstrate the harm to communities when pollution is not just a cause of harm but enabled by other structural inequities from policy and planning.

In health policy and urban planning, select scientific reporting is sometimes used to justify political decisions on the notion that science presents strong or irrefutable evidence. However, as scientific research operates on a different set of principles than how knowledge and evidence may be developed in these public realms, there are risks of studies being used to justify high impact political decisions outside of the scope of the research.

Air pollution data, in the form of air quality monitor readings and models, is often used as a convenient proxy when institutions are talking about community health. However, air pollution and health are separate yet interacting phenomena which makes pollution data less representative of the health concerns that people have around pollution.

Data is a powerful tool for justice and language for accountability. However, data can easily be manipulated and used to entrench inequities. In this lesson, I'll cover some of the fundamentals around how we define data and what this means for health justice.