Tracing Environmental Equity and Air Pollution Research at ES&T

D ecades of academic and community-based research around environmental justice have highlighted that communities marginalized by intersecting dimensions of race, ethnicity, class, income, and other forms of structural inequity often experience higher air pollution exposure burdens.These disparities in exposure to health-harming air pollutants reflect both structural drivers that shape where emissions and people are located, and physical processes that determine how these pollutants move and transform in the atmosphere.Across these topics, one theme is that air quality improvements do not necessarily reduce relative disparities.In recognition of 60 years of ES&T publications, this viewpoint highlights Environmental Science & Technology (ES&T) articles about air pollution exposure and environmental equity and then closes by identifying paths forward for research that supports equity outcomes.Our look back at ES&T articles on this topic had two starting points.First, ES&T editors provided us a list, generated October 22, 2025, of 1269 ES&T articles with "air quality" in the title or abstract.Second, our search (UC Berkeley library website; December 29, 2025) for articles in ES&T with keywords "equity justice", "equity air pollution"; "air quality justice", or "inequality air pollution" identified 55 unique articles.Most (84%; 46 out of 55 articles) were published in 2020 or later, reflecting that this topic has gained momentum in ES&T since 2020, when addressing social justice challenges was more widely prioritized.The first ES&T publications on this topic 1-5 were calls-to-action and reported methodological inadequacies within existing literature on science and engineering aspects of