Environmental justice and health practices: understanding how health inequities arise at the local level

While empirical evidence continues to show that people living in low socio-economic status neighbourhoods are less likely to engage in health-enhancing behaviour, our understanding of why this is so remains less than clear. We suggest that two changes could take place to move from description to understanding in this field; (i) a move away from the established concept of individual health behaviour to a contextualised understanding of health practices; and (ii) a switch from focusing on health inequalities in outcomes to health inequities in conditions. We apply Pierre Bourdieu's theory on capital interaction but find it insufficient with regard to the role of agency for structural change. We therefore introduce Amartya Sen's capability approach as a useful link between capital interaction theory and action to reduce social inequities in health-related practices. Sen's capability theory also elucidates the importance of discussing unequal chances in terms of inequity, rather than inequality, in order to underscore the moral nature of inequalities. We draw on the discussion in social geography on environmental injustice, which also underscores the moral nature of the spatial distribution of opportunities. The article ends by applying this approach to the 'Interdisciplinary study of inequalities in smoking' framework.

Description of the ERA-CLIM historical upper-air data

Historical, i.e. pre-1957, upper-air data are a valuable source of information on the state of the atmosphere, in some parts of the world dating back to the early 20th century. However, to date, reanalyses have only partially made use of these data, and only of observations made after 1948. Even for the period between 1948 (the starting year of the NCEP/NCAR (National Centers for Environmental Prediction/National Center for Atmospheric Research) reanalysis) and the International Geophysical Year in 1957 (the starting year of the ERA-40 reanalysis), when the global upper-air coverage reached more or less its current status, many observations have not yet been digitised. The Comprehensive Historical Upper-Air Network (CHUAN) already compiled a large collection of pre-1957 upper-air data. In the framework of the European project ERA-CLIM (European Reanalysis of Global Climate Observations), significant amounts of additional upper-air data have been catalogued (> 1.3 million station days), imaged (> 200 000 images) and digitised (> 700 000 station days) in order to prepare a new input data set for upcoming reanalyses. The records cover large parts of the globe, focussing on, so far, less well covered regions such as the tropics, the polar regions and the oceans, and on very early upper-air data from Europe and the US. The total number of digitised/inventoried records is 61/101 for moving upper-air data, i.e. data from ships, etc., and 735/1783 for fixed upper-air stations. Here, we give a detailed description of the resulting data set including the metadata and the quality checking procedures applied. The data will be included in the next version of CHUAN. The data are available at doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.821222