Over the past few years, something to which I have kept returning is how often equity is invoked in debates about public health and the environment – and how often those claims don’t really hold up.
I started to think of these as false equity arguments. A false equity argument is when the language of justice is used to defend or promote a policy that doesn’t actually make things more equal – and may even perpetuate or exacerbate inequalities. On the surface, it sounds progressive, even caring. But underneath, it distracts us from the real sources of inequity: socioeconomic inequality, racialised disadvantage, and power imbalances.
And this is the basis for the argument I want to share: doing one and not the other is the injustice. If we only focus on reducing exposures to environmental hazards, but fail to address the unequal distribution of their impacts, we are left with injustice. And worse, when equity is invoked falsely, we risk cementing those inequalities rather than dismantling them.
Exposure, Vulnerability, and Shared Causes
When we talk about exposure and vulnerability, we often describe them as if they are separate: who is more exposed to hazards, and who is more vulnerable to their effects – we also treat one as modifiable and the other as intractable. But in reality, they are two sides of the same coin.
The reason disadvantaged groups are more exposed is the same reason they are more vulnerable: underlying socioeconomic inequality often racialised, and unequal access to power.
Think of a low-income family living in cheaper housing close to a major road. They’re more exposed to transport pollution because of where they live. But that same family is also more vulnerable to the health effects of pollution because of their socioeconomic disadvantage.
This is not a coincidence – it’s the same inequality showing up in different forms. Exposure and vulnerability share a mutual cause: the structural inequalities that leave some groups with fewer choices, fewer protections, and less voice.
So if we focus only on reducing average exposures, we miss the bigger picture. Without addressing the underlying inequality, the same groups will remain both more exposed and more vulnerable. And that’s why doing one without the other is the injustice.
Case Study: The EV Road User Tax
Let me illustrate this with a current example in Australia. The government has proposed a road user tax for electric vehicles. The justification is straightforward: as fuel excise revenue falls, governments need a new way to offset these losses.
Climate and health advocates responded by saying: “At a time when we need to be accelerating electric vehicle adoption to meet climate and health goals, a road user tax risks punishing people for making cleaner, healthier transport choices. Australia’s most vulnerable communities already bear the brunt of transport pollution. Disincentivising electric vehicles now will only deepen existing health and environmental inequalities.”
It’s a powerful statement – but here’s the problem. This is a false equity argument. While I agree that the government should intervene in the market to incentivise electric vehicle uptake over fossil fuel-powered ones, it’s not inherently equitable. Right now, EVs are purchased by wealthier households (who live in wealthier areas). Saying that taxing them is unjust for disadvantaged groups is misleading, because those groups are not the ones buying EVs in the first place, and the air pollution reductions from EV uptake will not be distributed equitably.
What this does is distract from the real injustice: socioeconomic inequality itself. The people who are most exposed to transport pollution are those living near major roads, in lower-income housing, without access to cleaner transport. Not taxing EVs doesn’t change that. It doesn’t change who can afford to drive one, or who still breathes the pollution.
And here’s the deeper injustice: when equity language is invoked in this way, it makes it seem as though we are addressing inequality – but in fact, we are doing the opposite. We are using inequality rhetorically to defend a policy that benefits the already privileged, while leaving the root causes of inequity untouched.
So the lesson here is: calling something equitable does not make it so. Environmental justice requires both reducing hazards and addressing the socioeconomic inequalities that determine who suffers the harms and who enjoys the benefits. Doing one without the other is the real injustice.
So what does all of this mean for understanding the distribution of environmental health risks and benefits?
First, it means that averages are not enough. We cannot measure success in environmental health or climate policy purely by reductions in aggregate exposures. Cleaner air, lower emissions, fewer toxins –these are necessary, but they are not sufficient. The real tests are whether the gaps in exposure and vulnerability are narrowing, and whether the same groups remain trapped in cycles of disadvantage.
Second, it means our research and teaching need to grapple explicitly with those structural drivers. As academics, we often analyse exposures and outcomes, but pay less attention to the political economy that creates them. If exposure and vulnerability share the same root cause, then environmental justice requires us to look upstream – to land use, to labour markets, to welfare and housing policy, to the distribution of political voice.
Third, it has implications for policy design. Environmental justice is not simply about removing hazards; it is about redistributing both risks and benefits. That means asking: who is positioned to gain from this policy, and who is left behind? For electric vehicles, it means pairing uptake incentives with measures that directly benefit low-income communities – like subsidising public transport, investing in cleaner fleets in high-pollution areas, or improving active transport options.
Fourth, it means we must be careful about the language of equity. As I’ve tried to show, invoking equity to defend policies that do not actually redistribute benefits is misleading. These false equity arguments can be seductive, because they make us feel like we are addressing injustice when, in fact, we may be entrenching it. They distract attention away from the structural drivers – socioeconomic inequality and power imbalance – that produce both greater exposure and greater vulnerability.
And finally, there is a normative point. Justice requires us to name injustice honestly. We cannot let the language of equity be used as cover for inequitable policies. And we cannot be satisfied with policies that reduce exposures while leaving inequalities untouched. Doing one and not the other is the injustice.
Swimming upstream 