Many communities across the United States are exposed to environmental hazards like air pollution and chemical contamination. The implications for the physical health and well-being of residents can often be significant. High concentrations of airborne particulate matter are linked to elevated asthma rates, cardiovascular disease, lung cancer and death.1 Land pollution from mines, industrial waste sites and chemical spills can make drinking water unsafe; exposure to industrial toxins has been linked to elevated cancer rates in nearby communities.2 Noise pollution from traffic has also been associated with negative effects on children’s cognition and achievement levels in school.3

These hazards also affect local governments in multiple ways. Contaminated areas can have a negative impact on property values, shrinking the local tax base and in some cases causing residents to move away, as was the case with the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment.4

Indirect additional costs — city worker overtime, local remediation efforts, water testing — increase the financial burden on these governments still further. To assess the overall exposure of communities across the United States to environmental hazards, ICE Climate has developed the ICE Environmental Hazard Score.

The ICE Environmental Hazard Score is constructed using data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. Census Bureau, and the U.S. Bureau of Mines. The following hazards are incorporated into the score:

The score is constructed by normalizing each hazard, summing across the hazards to obtain a composite metric and then scaling the resulting values into a score between zero and five. A higher ICE Environmental Hazard Score indicates more exposure to the suite of environmental hazards. Accompanying the score are two additional metrics that incorporate information about relative exposure — the percent of the population within a given area that live in communities in the top 25th and bottom 25th percentile of the score’s national distribution. ICE Climate builds the scores based on data about these hazards at the census tract level. Using our spatial downscaling and re-aggregation techniques, these scores can then be estimated for all municipalities and areas of interest across the country.

What can the Environmental Hazard Score tell us?

Areas with high Environmental Hazard Scores can be found throughout the country, with some of the highest scores in large cities such as Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia (Figure 1).

Figure 1. ICE Environmental Hazard Scores of counties within the conterminous United States. (Source: ICE Climate as of 11/27/24)

Taking a closer look at the state of Pennsylvania, the areas near the cities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia appear to have significantly higher scores than some of the more rural areas of the state (Figure 2).

Figure 2. ICE Environmental Hazard Scores of census tracts across the state of Pennsylvania. (Source: ICE Climate as of 11/25/24)

Philadelphia County, which ranks high on the list of counties with the greatest prevalence of man-made environmental hazards,5 contains census tracts with some of the highest Environmental Hazard Scores, especially along the Delaware River (Figure 3). By 2015, counties making up the Philadelphia region had over 200 designated Superfund sites in various stages of cleanup; Philadelphia County had the most with 44.6 Air quality is also a major issue for this area — the city of Philadelphia is one of the nation’s worst areas for ozone and year-round particle pollution.7

In Chester, a neighboring city located in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, many residents live in pre-1980s housing stock in locations contaminated by a large number of industrial polluting facilities.8 One of the poorest cities in Pennsylvania, Chester filed for bankruptcy in 2022.9 For a city already dealing with extreme financial stress, the presence of environmental hazards is one more stressor that can lead to serious health and economic consequences for nearby communities over time.