Exposure monitoring toward environmental justice

Executive Order 14008, signed on 27 January 2021, established environmental justice (EJ) as a core priority of the Biden Administration. There is a need for state and federal regulators, as well as industry, to enhance risk assessment methods and exposure monitoring approaches to be more inclusive of EJ community involvement and more representative of EJ community exposures. Cumulative risk assessment models are critical for understanding the unique interaction between chemical exposures and nonchemical stressors that EJ communities encounter daily. Enhanced environmental monitoring with personal and portable sensors, especially when deployed using community partnerships, can capture chemical exposures with sufficient resolution to characterize exposures down to the neighborhood level. Use of internet-linked sensors will also require thoughtful advances in management of big data to inform meaningful and time-sensitive decisions. (C) 2021 SETAC