community assets

The community assets we have chosen to include in our analysis are schools, parks, streams, care homes/hospitals, Burns Bog, and those agricultural lands protected under the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR). We have also included the proximity of the SFPR to populations of children and seniors in this part of the analysis. We chose these particular community assets because they are places where either people or the environment are highly sensitive and the most vulnerable to air pollution.

We first had to determine at what distance community assets are likely to be vulnerable to air pollution from the SFPR. According to the provincial government’s Local Air Quality Impact Assessment, this distance is 1km.

"Locally (within 1 km of the SFPR) emissions from traffic on the SFPR are predicted to cause an increase in concentrations of the various contaminants.”
-(Technical Volume 7, Page 63 para 3)

After establishing a reasonable size for our buffer, we were then able to clip for those community assets that fell within 1km of the SFPR. The steps taken to produce our results are outlined in the flow charts in Figures 2 and 3 below.

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environmental justice

In order to determine if any issues of environmental justice are associated with the construction of the SFPR, we looked at average household income and immigrant status based upon statistics Canada Dissemination Areas (DAs). The steps taken to produce our results are outlined in the flow chart in Figure 4.

figure-4

Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) and Particulate Matter 2.5 (PM2.5)

We converted the 300m buffer polygon to raster using a cell size of 50m in both the NO2 and PM2.5 maps. After extracting the raster values for NO2 levels within 300m of the SFPR and major truck routes, the field RASTERVALU contained some cells with the miscellaneous variable -9999. We selected for RASTERVALU > -9999 and created a new layer with the remaining variables. This miscellaneous variable of -9999 appeared to be

those cells that landed partially over water bodies, for which the model contains no value.

The major truck routes layer was created using select by location. The major truck routes were selected from the highways layer based upon the map in Figure 5. From there, a new layer was created based upon the selected features.

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