Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Environmental Sciences

Document Type

Dissertation

Abstract

Communities are rarely exposed to environmental hazards in isolation. Instead, environmental, social, and health-related stressors co-occur, contributing to uneven patterns of cumulative environmental health burden. This dissertation examines cumulative environmental health impacts in Louisiana by analyzing individual indicator patterns, developing a state-specific index, and comparing alternative screening frameworks. It first characterizes the spatial and distributional patterns of indicators used to operationalize cumulative burden across Louisiana census tracts using exploratory spatial data analysis and concentration-based measures of inequality. Results show that multiple burdens are socially patterned and geographically structured, with statistically significant clustering across environmental indicators and disproportionate concentration among minority populations, indicating systematic distributional inequities.

Building on this groundwork, the dissertation develops a Louisiana-specific cumulative environmental health impacts index (LA-CEHI) that follows the multiplicative framework used in CalEnviroScreen (CES). The resulting index identifies concentrated patterns of cumulative burden across Louisiana, with the highest-burden census tracts located in urban and industrial regions. Higher index scores were significantly associated with lower life expectancy, reflecting consistent relationships with population-level health outcomes, and corresponded to areas identified as hotspots across multiple indicators. This demonstrated that a CES-style framework can be adapted to Louisiana using available datasets, yielding stable, policy-relevant patterns of cumulative burden.

Finally, LA-CEHI is compared with two national screening tools, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Environmental Justice Index and the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool. While areas of overlap were evident, particularly in the identification of the highest-burden tracts in major urban and industrial regions, the tools also exhibited meaningful differences in spatial patterns, diverging more substantially at the census tract level outside these areas and identifying different communities as high priority. CEJST had broader coverage across the state and the strongest association with life expectancy. The EJI assigned higher burden to a wider set of rural tracts, and LA-CEHI yielded a more concentrated pattern of high-burden tracts in urban and industrial areas. These findings highlight that while national screening tools provide valuable broad-scale insight, state or locally tailored indices could support more targeted prioritization and stakeholder engagement, improving how cumulative impacts are identified and addressed in practice.

Date

3-27-2026

Committee Chair

Lam, Nina S.

LSU Acknowledgement

1

LSU Accessibility Acknowledgment

1

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Available for download on Monday, March 26, 2029

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