EPP Seminar: Sonia Mangones — Transportation, Air Pollution, and Inequalities: Evidence from Bogotá, Colombia

Environmental justice research often examines the burden of pollution in relation to the population’s socioeconomic vulnerability. Climate justice research examines differential responsibility, asking who emits and who ultimately carries the burden they create. Urban mobility justice research rarely combines these two questions empirically, even though mobility is where they intersect most directly, since travel generates emissions and also shapes where resulting pollution concentrations fall across the city. This talk presents findings from an empirical study of Bogotá, Colombia, that measures both sides of this relationship at the level of city blocks, combining residential pollution concentration (NO2 and PM2.5) with a block-level proxy for travel-emission responsibility built from official mobility and emissions data. Two findings challenge a simple story in which the poor pollute least and suffer most. First, pollution concentration does not increase monotonically with deprivation; it peaks at intermediate socioeconomic levels. Second, emission responsibility does decline cleanly with vulnerability, but the resulting imbalance, where responsibility is low and pollution concentration is high, concentrates in population segments that can only be identified by combining policy instruments that separately inform socioeconomic vulnerability and the spatial distribution of the imbalance. I discuss what this means for the mobility justice conversation and the implications for transportation and environmental policy. Speaker BIo: Sonia Cecilia Mangones Matos is an Associate Professor at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where she directs the Translogyt Research Group. Her work lies at the intersection of transportation engineering, urban sustainability, environmental impacts of transportation, road safety, and public policy. Her research combines quantitative methods, data analytics, and interdisciplinary approaches to examine sustainable urban mobility, transporta