This chapter provides case studies and discussion about the ways that youth‐led research and evaluation can help link youth and community development goals and outcomes.

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The identification of “environmental justice (EJ) communities” is an increasingly common element in environmental planning, policy, and regulation. As a result, the choice of methods to define and identify these communities is a critical and often contentious process. This contentiousness is, in turn, a factor of the lack of a commonly accepted method, the concern among many EJ advocates and some regulators that existing frameworks are inadequate, and ultimately, the significant consequences of such designations for both public policy and community residents. With the aim of assisting regulators and advocates to more strategically focus their efforts, the authors developed a Cumulative Environmental Vulnerability Assessment (CEVA). This CEVA is composed of a Cumulative Environmental Hazard Index and a Social Vulnerability Index, with a Health Index as a reference. Applying CEVA produces spatial analysis that identifies the places that are subject to both the highest concentrations of cumulative environmental hazards and the fewest social, economic and political resources to prevent, mitigate, or adapt to these conditions. We recommended that these areas receive special consideration in permitting, monitoring, and enforcement actions, as well as investments in public participation, capacity building, and community economic development.

Safe and secure water is a cornerstone of modern life in the global North. This article critically examines a set of prevalent myths about household water in high-income countries, with a focus on Canada and the United States. Taking a relational approach, we argue that household water insecurity is a product of institutionalized structures and power, manifests unevenly through space and time, and is reproduced in places we tend to assume are the most water-secure in the world. We first briefly introduce "modern water" and the modern infrastructural ideal, a highly influential set of ideas that have shaped household water provision and infrastructure development over the past two centuries. Against this backdrop, we consolidate evidence to disrupt a set of narratives about water in high-income countries: the notion that water access is universal, clean, affordable, trustworthy, and uniformly or equitably governed. We identify five thematic areas of future research to delineate an agenda for advancing scholarship and actionincluding challenges of legal and regulatory regimes, the housing-water nexus, water affordability, and water quality and contamination. Data gaps underpin the experiences of household water insecurity. Taken together, our review of water security for households in high-income countries provides a conceptual map to direct critical research in this area for the coming years.

Transportation policies, plans, and projects all flow through state institutions because of the substantial cost of infrastructure and the need to assess transportation system performance, including equity implications. But environmental justice scholarship interrogates the state’s role in perpetuating injustice. Most research and planning practice related to transportation equity has relied upon state-sponsored analytical methods. Transportation planners and scholars can benefit from critical assessments of these approaches. We propose a shift in focus from transportation equity to a broader consideration of transportation justice that is more closely aligned with models of social change promulgated in the environmental justice literature and by related movements.

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The transition from single-media, single-location, and single point-in-time analysis to a cumulative approach represents a profound challenge-and opportunity-for policy makers, planners, advocates and researchers. These challenges and opportunities are, in part, methodological (e.g., data availability of pollution sources, uncertainty of chemical reactions among multiple pollutants, evaluating combined health effects of multiple environmental stressors). However, the social complexity of this issue has been acknowledged, but not systematically documented and analyzed. As a result, there is a significant gap between the development of cumulative impacts analysis and a limited ability to reap their benefit in resolving environmental justice conflicts. Framing cumulative impacts as a "wicked problem" can help highlight some of the challenges in implementing such approaches and can point the way towards applying these approaches to improving collaboration between policy makers, planners, and advocates. We present two case studies of cumulative impacts analysis in California using sociospatial mapping and public participatory geographic information system (PPGIS). These cases will illustrate the challenges and opportunities for combining quantitative and socio-spatial science with PPGIS as strategies to address the wicked nature of assessing and acting to address cumulative environmental impacts. The case studies will emphasize the value of an adaptive, participatory, and transdisciplinary approach as an effective response to the wicked qualities of cumulative impacts themselves. These cases can help planners, policy makers, and community advocates to apply a cumulative impacts approach to their own wicked problems. Coalition and their UC Davis colleagues. In particular, we thank Teri Greenfield from the UC Davis Center for Regional Change and Tara Zagofsky from the UC Davis Collaboration Center for their crucial contributions to these participatory mapping projects. The authors also thank The California Endowment,

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