Mapping Environmental Justice in King County, WA

The purpose of project 3 was to map the distribution of pollution sources in King County, WA in relation to marginalized populations. In order to do this, I downloaded census data, formatted it correctly, and joined it to a shapefile of census blocks. Then, I created a model to use weighted areal interpolation to estimate the population of BIPOC and impoverished individuals that live within 4km of a superfund site or major pollution source. This involved erasing non-residential areas from the buffers and block groups, performing a union analysis to identify block groups or portions of block groups that fall within the buffers, and calculating the area-weighted estimate of demographic characteristics both inside and outside of the buffer areas.