An Environmental Justice Analysis of Distribution-Level Natural Gas Leaks in Massachusetts, USA: Datasets and Supplementary Material
Description
Data, R code, markdown documents, and supplementary material for an environmental justice analysis of distribution-level natural gas leaks across Massachusetts. Analyses are based on American Community Survey 2015-19 population estimates at the Census Block Group, Census Tract, and Census County Subdivision (i.e., municipality) levels, and 2019 gas leaks data geocoded by HEET (http://heet.org) which are derived from Annual Service Quality Reports submitted to the state Department of Public Utilities from six of the seven investor-owned natural gas utilities in Massachusetts. The file "An Environmental Justice Analysis of Gas Leaks4.Rmd" is the final markdown document used to produce the PDF manuscript submitted for publication. To knit this document to a PDF, all of the RDS files listed in that document must be in the correct relative path. The Workflow Diagram.pdf illustrates the relationship of files, data, and processes, although it does not communicate the file path structure. Necessary data files are located in the 'Data' folder primarily as RDS files to be imported using R. R code to clean, process, and generate RDS files is located in the 'Analysis Code' folder. Validity of the results was checked in two ways: 1) Dunn’s Multiple Comparison Test (or Dunn’s Test), which is a post-hoc non-parametric test of significant differences, was used to check for significant differences in exposure between groups. Those results are found in the 'Dunns Tests' folder. The file "DunnTestSummary.xlsx" contains a summary of results, while output tables for each level of analysis are contained in the subfolders. R code to run the Dunn's tests is in the files in 'Analysis Code' folder within their respective levels of analysis (e.g., BG for Block Group, TR for Tract, etc.). 2) Analysis of 2020 leaks data to see if patterns were roughly consistent with 2019. Although the 2020 data is more current, we did not use it as the focus of our analysis because of concerns about the representativeness of 2020 data given the impact of the COVID pandemic. Figures from that analysis are located in the 'Figures2020' folder. Code to generate figures for the 2020 data are contained in the 'Analysis Code' folder with the suffix '2020'.
Files
Steps to reproduce
The file "An Environmental Justice Analysis of Gas Leaks2.Rmd" is the markdown document used to produce the PDF manuscript submitted for publication. Knit this document using R and Rstudio. 'Data' folder and its contents must be a subdirectory. R script files from the 'Analysis Code' folder require that the 'Data' folder and its contents is a subdirectory.