Informing aquatic restoration decisions using environmental justice in New Hampshire

ABSTRACT Aquatic resources support ecosystem functions and values, such as recreation, wildlife habitat, flood storage and nutrient reduction. Previous studies have found evidence that aquatic restoration programs can lead to systemic resource relocation and inequitable outcomes. This project advances the methodology to test for such inequality, applying geospatial methods within the U.S. state of New Hampshire to compare demographic profiles around sites with permitted losses of wetland functions and values, and separately, around sites where compensatory mitigation for such losses occurred. Contrary to expectations, we did not find permit sites tend to be located in areas with lower household incomes, lower education levels, or higher minority populations as compared to non-permit sites. We did find support for hypothesized patterns of lower minority populations, higher education levels, and higher household incomes around mitigation sites as compared to non-mitigation sites. Both permit and mitigation sites tend to be in areas with lower population densities, higher education levels, and higher percentages of white populations. Three different statistical approaches obtain results that diverge in their details but support a substantive conclusion: mitigation expenditures have gone disproportionately to more privileged locations. Our findings support integrating environmental justice considerations into implementation of compensatory mitigation policy.