Ten questions concerning the future of residential indoor air quality and its environmental justice implications

Abstract

• Residential indoor air quality is changing significantly, with unequal impacts. • Environmental justice is about more than just unequal exposures. • Five environmental justice dimensions are applied to residential indoor air quality. • Addressing indoor air quality inequities requires a transdisciplinary approach. Humans spend a large proportion of their time at home, where exposure to poor indoor air quality has detrimental – and often inequitably distributed – impacts on health and wellbeing. Unprecedented changes to residential indoor environments are expected in the coming decades, especially in order to meet net zero energy and greenhouse gas emissions targets. However, it is unclear how these changes will affect indoor air quality, and to what extent they will differentially impact different social groups. In this paper, we pose and address ten questions concerning the future of residential indoor air quality and its environmental justice implications. We pay attention to environmental justice in relation to indoor air quality, including distributive, procedural, recognition, capabilities, and epistemic dimensions. The ten questions specifically address: social gradients in health and exposure, and how changes in climate, policies, behaviours, technologies, populations, and demographics might affect residential indoor air quality and environmental justice. We also highlight the role that transdisciplinary research can play in improving residential indoor air quality in a more environmentally just way.