According to environmental justice, environmental degradation and benefits should not be disproportionately shared between communities. Identifying disparities in the spatial distribution of environmental degradation is therefore a prerequisite for validating the state of environmental justice in a geographic region. Under ideal circumstances, environmental risk assessment is a preferred metric, but only when exposure levels have been quantified reliably after estimating the risk. In this study, we adopt a proximity burden metric caused by adjacent hazardous sources, allowing us to evaluate the environmental burden distribution and vulnerability to pollution sources. In close collaboration with a predominantly Latinx community in Chicago, we highlight the usefulness of our approach through a case study that shows how certain community areas in the city are likely to bear a disproportionate burden of environmental pollution caused by industrial roads.

翻译：根据环境正义,环境退化和惠益不应在社区之间不成比例地分享。因此,查明环境退化的空间分布差异是确认一个地理区域环境正义状况的先决条件。在理想的情况下,环境风险评估是一种可取的衡量标准,但只有在估计风险后可靠地量化了接触水平时,才是一种衡量标准。在这项研究中,我们采用了由相邻危险源造成的近距离负担衡量标准,使我们能够评估环境负担分布和易受污染源影响的程度。我们与芝加哥一个以拉丁裔为主的社区密切合作,通过案例研究强调我们的方法的有用性,该案例研究表明城市某些社区地区可能如何承受工业道路造成的环境污染的过重负担。