Geographies of Dirty Water: Landscape-Scale Inequities in Coastal Access in Rhode Island.

ABSTRACT: Across the United States, development, gentrification, and water quality degradation have altered our access to the coasts, redistributing the benefits from those spaces. Building on prior coastal and green space access research, we examined different populations' relative travel distances to all public coastal access and to public marine swimming beaches across the state of Rhode Island, by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomics. Next, we assessed relative travel distances to high quality public coastal amenities, i.e., sites with no history of water quality impairment. We used three state-level policy attributes to identify sites with the best water quality: Clean Water Act Section 303(d) impaired waters, shellfishing restrictions, and bacterial beach closure histories. Our analysis reveale

SUBMITTER: Twichell JH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8903087 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature