Reducing Concentrated Environmental Burden: Addressing Cumulative Impacts in Government Decision Making

This special issue on Cumulative Impacts and Government Decision Making is a first-of-its-kind collection of scholarship in this critically important area of public health and environmental justice. Pulling together scholarship that documents practice, policy, and research on the issue is both important and timely. Clearly, there exists a substantial body of practice associated with this important issue. While this work is still in development, its contours are beginning to take shape and make it possible to garner lessons from actual practice to help guide current and future efforts. To help facilitate such a process, we put forward, in this overview article, the idea of a fit-for-purpose continuum as a structured approach for better understanding, tracking, promoting, and identifying elements of success regarding progress in the development and implementation of analytical and policy approaches. The articles in this special issue fall into three categories, that is, (1) breakthroughs in policy and decision making, (2) growing sophistication in developing and implementing analytical tools and methods, and (3) emerging areas of science and research. They represent cross-cutting scholarship on the part of community activists, academicians, and government officials and serve as models for advancing future multi-sector and multi-disciplinary collaboration.