Creating just, healthy cities: challenging inequalities in health deprivation from air pollution in minority communities

Overview:
This project aims to investigate emerging issues around air pollution and wide spread disease (focusing on COVID-19[1]) and inequalities in society, namely, socioeconomic status, ethnicity and access to health/welfare support.
Research Questions-1: Are members of UK lower income and/or BAME communities exposed to higher levels of air pollution than other demographics; are these citizens being relatively disadvantaged by current UK planning (housing), social welfare and health policies; and how could health and air pollution policies be adjusted to mitigate this?
Research Questions-2: Do linkages exist (in existing data) between air pollution exposure, socioeconomic status, ethnicity and access to health/welfare support, and outcome and severity of COVID-19?
The global pandemic resulted in early recognition of an ethnic disparity in vulnerability to contracting diseases such as COVID-19, and outcome severity [2]. Bio-culturally, this inter-population variation in susceptibility relates to more than biology or genes. Early research suggests that socio-economic factors e.g. employment and housing status may have led to health disparities and resulted in inequalities during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that there may also be linkages with respect to these health inequalities/outcomes and exposure to air pollution, a growing global threat to health with deprived areas of society often suffering from greatest exposure despite contributing least to emissions[3]. This consequential link between socioeconomic deprivation, housing, ethnicity, air pollution exposure and health risks[4] need to be explored to ensure health equality and social justice in society moving forward.
Unfortunately, only early exploratory studies have been conducted on these issues during the COVID-19 pandemic, as such there exists a major research gap in understanding spatio-temporal evolution of air pollution and its impacts linked to health inequalities and ethnic disparity on the backdrop of a major pandemic. This PhD aims to address this research gap using quantitative and qualitative techniques to investigate linkages between key air pollutants, COVID-19 instance and outcome, and socio-economic descriptors (e.g. ethnicity and deprivation) and also to understand the impacts of key policies on low-income and BAME communities, and the structural issues that need to be tackled that often mean such communities get pushed to more vulnerable living areas of society.


Figure 1: Age-adjusted COVID-19 UK mortality rate between 29th June 2020 and 31st January 2021 by ethnic group (source: gov.uk).
Alt Text: Sudden rise in rate ~ winter 2020, with other, Asian, black and mixed-race ethnic categories significantly higher than white.