Background
The CalEnviroScreen 4.0 (CES 4.0) dataset provides a very powerful and detailed overview of an environmental health screening developed by the California Office of Environmental Health and Hazard Assessment (OEHHA). There are several factors such as diesel emissions, ozone concentration in the air, lead exposure, among many others that are taken into account to calculate a CalEnviroScreen Score or CES 4.0 Score. Considering this Score a reliable source to assess the burden environmental burden imposed on different populations, this study aims to reveal how different ethnicities and/or age groups are related to this score.
Discussion
As the two graphs shown above explain, the age group are relatively well dispersed among different ranges of the CES 4.0 Score. However, it does not apply to the CES 4.0 Score composition by ethnicity. It is specially clear when comparing the White vs. Latino populations, that as the CES 4.0 increase, approaching an ideal environmental scenario the White population increase and the Latino population fraction decreases. The opposite happens when the environmental scenario is far from ideal, as when taking the highest 90th to 100th percentile range, and the White population fraction is only of 9.48% whereas the Latino population rises up to 73.9%. This study shows that a more in depth analysis should be performed to analyze if these differences seen only at the ethnical level and not the age group level are due to a geographically marginalized problem, rather than just environmental.