Stories

Miranda was selected as one of ten students to present a talk during the Gordon Research Seminar portion of the week. She presented “Indigenous Communities, Rural Vulnerability, and Environmental Justice Near Unconventional Natural Gas Development in Canada” as part of the section “Interdisciplinarity in Industrial Ecology”. This study explores possible disproportionate exposures to oil and gas-related hazards for Indigenous and socio-economically vulnerable communities living in northeastern British Columbia, an area of intensive hydraulic fracturing. The study finds inequalities in exposure to air pollution for areas with high proportions of Indigenous populations. Areas with high community vulnerability are found to experience higher exposure to active unconventional wells, facility emissions, and air pollution, with the most vulnerable areas experiencing 11 to 96 times higher concentrations of air pollution. The study also finds that as the vulnerability of an area increases, the concentrations of air pollutants also increase. This study builds on previous environmental justice research that has found disparities in exposure in areas producing oil and gas in North America. These results suggest the presence of unequal exposures in an area expected to continue producing a large portion of Canadian natural gas.