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Paper short abstract

Data-rich health technologies are increasingly promoted for addressing health burdens, but carry high environmental impacts and exacerbate health inequities. We advance the concept of Environmental Health Data Justice to re-territorialize the environmental and social justice effects of health data.

Paper long abstract

The rise of data-rich health systems and technologies is an emergent field of environmental justice. Data-rich health technologies, including artificial intelligence, are increasingly promoted as a means to address health burdens, including those driven by anthropogenic environmental change. However, data-rich health technologies come with burdens of their own. They carry substantial environmental impacts, exacerbating both local pollution and global climate change while at the same time digitizing existing health inequities. One of the most concerning effects of these dynamics is that the communities who are likely to be most affected by matters of health data justice are often the same communities that are disproportionately affected by environmental harms. To explore these entanglements, this paper proposes the concept of Environmental Health Data Justice (EHDJ). EHDJ makes visible connections beyond immediate health data ecosystems and can enable a re-territorialization of the environmental and social justice effects specific to health data. Drawing on different case studies, we show how the logic of extraction underpins both the material and “immaterial” components of health data practices. We propose that while environmental and social justice movements have long invested in promoting and protecting multi-faceted areas of health, it is important to turn our attention specifically to the logics, infrastructures, and relationships of health datafication and the effects on our bodies, communities, and lived environments. EHDJ aims to ensure that health-relevant data is collected, shared, processed, and acted upon in ways that dismantle systemic forms of environmental and health injustice and advance the needs of marginalized communities.