Cumulative impact assessment within vulnerable communities: challenges, opportunities and path forward

Abstract

Cumulative impact assessment (CIA) has emerged as an approach for evaluating the combined environmental and social burdens disproportionately experienced by vulnerable communities. Such communities often face multiple overlapping stressors, including chemical exposures, poverty, lifestyle factors, psychosocial stress, underinvestment in infrastructure, and reduced healthcare access that interact to exacerbate health disparities. CIA differs from traditional risk assessment (RA) by emphasizing community-level characterization of combined and contextual stressors and prioritizing interventions rather than precise quantitative risk estimates; traditional RA was not designed to fully capture the cumulative, place-based nature of co-occurring stressors. CIA has therefore developed as a separate, coexistent framework that supports identification, prioritization, and mitigation of disproportionate community burdens.