Assessing and Addressing Environmental Health Disparities with Indigenous Communities: An Environmental Health Disparities Literature Review

Abstract

This literature review comprehensively examines environmental health disparities impacting indigenous communities and explores intervention strategies through community-based participatory methods. It also aims to inform future research to bridge the gap in access to evidence-based planning data for indigenous community-based environmental health monitoring and evaluation. Indigenous peoples face compounded environmental health disparities compared to settler populations, exacerbated by intersecting issues of climate change, environmental injustice, pollution, and a lack of appropriate evidence-based planning data. The review identifies climate change as a pervasive theme of disparity, alongside the importance of community-based participatory research (CBPR), culturally appropriate monitoring and evaluation, and community-based risk assessments. It concludes that addressing systemic threats to biocultural resources and the heightened vulnerability of indigenous peoples to environmental toxins necessitates unprecedented cooperative efforts among indigenous communities, researchers, and health practitioners. A social-ecological approach is proposed, merging local indigenous knowledge systems with scientific methods and advocating for policy shifts at the international level. The review highlights the critical role of community-based approaches, sustainability, and involving indigenous elders in research to foster culturally appropriate and effective interventions, emphasizing the need for flexible, reciprocal, and ethically sound methodologies that prioritize indigenous perspectives and data.