Environmental justice as an issue of public health ethics

Environmental justice is a topic at the interface of social, environmental, and health policy. It is concerned with unequal socio-spatial distributions of environmental exposures, the effects of such unequal distributions (e.g., on health), and approaches to their prevention, clean-up or compensation. Environmental justice has some overlap with public health, which is still little recognized. Environmental justice is relevant for the new discussion on public health ethics, as ethical conclusions differ, to some degree, between public health and environmental justice, despite similar topics and often identical effect variables.