USC Environmental Health Centers illustrates sustainability with infographics

Infographic on neighborhood oil drilling

The USC Environmental Health Centers Community Engagement team collaborates with environmental justice organizations and scientists to develop culturally-sensitive and accessible infographics to understand risks associated with air pollution, chemical exposures and health outcomes.

Each graphic is available to download and has an associated collection of research articles to equip community organizers, health care professionals and decision-makers with key scientific resources.

Infographics are a tool to introduce communities to scientific information, expand the awareness around environmental exposures, report back research results, and enhance the environmental health literacy of environmental justice communities in Southern California and beyond.  We use an iterative, multidirectional, multilingual process that engages scientists and communities to co-create graphic-based research dissemination tools. 

Environmental health literacy describes the learning and agency involved in growing an understanding of the role of environmental hazards on health which can translate into improvement of health outcomes for an individual or community. Identification of environmental hazards at the neighborhood scale is almost always rooted in community discovery and can provide highly valuable information for self-protection, for pollution prevention, and for remediation, all of which are important concerns in communities facing environmental health disparities.

There are unique concerns specific to environmental justice and immigrant communities, including multiple and complex environmental and social exposures. These infographics, that have been translated into multiple languages, utilize a language justice framework, to effectively foster dialogue around community concerns, research findings, and policy strategies that can reduce the environmental health burdens.