Links between environmental quality and health have been of increased interest in recent years, with studies investigating the effects of air pollution, river-water quality and contaminated land. The current project investigated the spatial associations between potentially harmful metals in the soil; air pollution indicators and health indicators, in the context of Environmental Justice across Glasgow. The relationships between indicators of deprivation and the other variables were also assessed. The key aims of this research were to assess the spatial distributions of the environmental and health variables across Greater Glasgow and to carry out an overview investigation of the spatial associations between the variables on a city-wide basis.
Chapter 1 is a literature review of environmental and health issues including a discussion of Environmental Justice in Scotland, the effects of air pollution on health, contaminated land legislation and the potential health effects of soil contaminants.
Chapter 2 is an introduction to the datasets used in the study, presentation methods and geostatistical analysis methodology, including variograms and kriging. The modelling and inference methods used are also discussed.
Chapter 3 presents a preliminary analysis of the soil metals dataset along with an exploratory analysis of each of the soil contaminants. This analysis focuses on the geologically and anthropogenically controlled distributions of each element, identifying and removing any trends which may be present and generating concentration predictions where necessary.
Chapter 4 includes the spatial presentation of each of the datasets, where each is presented at the Intermediate Geography (IG) level. In this chapter, the geometric mean of each soil contaminant is illustrated across Greater Glasgow along with an index of soil metal scores based on distribution percentiles.
Chapter 5 contains the results of the analysis whereby the relationships between the environmental and health indicators are assessed. This includes an exploratory analysis of the spatial associations between the variables
before the relationships are then formally assessed with use of generalised linear models and relative risks. This Chapter also discusses issues regarding modelling health outcomes, modelling the soil contaminants and the ecological fallacy.
Chapter 6 summarises the findings of the research, some constraints to the analysis and recommendations for future work on environmental and health studies
