Border Scenario: Knowledge Production As an Environmental Justice Issue for Earthquake Risk Mitigation in San Diego and Tijuana

Between 2015 and 2020, a binational and interdisciplinary team collected and analyzed data from San Diego, USA, and Tijuana, Mexico. Their goal was an earthquake scenario that addresses conditions in these two closely related cities to stimulate new popular awareness of seismic hazard and update risk management policy at city and regional levels to help protect people in the region. Despite the efforts of the team involved in the project, the scenario that was eventually published focused on San Diego and left Tijuana out entirely. We draw evidence from Scenario reports, 3 years of participant observation in the Scenario, and interviews with key participants to explore and demonstrate the implications of inequities between participants employed in Mexico and those working in the United States. We show how the disparities between Tijuana- and San Diego-based Scenario contributors' experiences had significant implications for the project. Data inaccessibility, financial constraints, and lack of institutional support were key challenges for this effort to study and mitigate environmental risks. Scenarios demonstrate and reproduce the values of the social institutions that develop them. In the context of this work, we attend to how systemic inequities inform not only our understanding of the exposures to environmental hazards, but also influence knowledge production related to the potential impact of those hazards. Focusing on knowledge offers an opportunity to consider how environmental hazards and the dangers they pose to different communities are understood and become available for intervention. We consider the Scenario project's challenges and propose strategies to support effective and just environmental risk mitigation. Although members of the Scenario team sought to build a collaborative project including team members in San Diego and Tijuana, they were unable to maintain binational coordination. Consequently, the Scenario project could only describe exposure to earthquake risk within the region to a limited extent. We highlight the importance of meaningful inclusion within the systems of research practice, technical analysis, and application; we call for scholarly and practical attention to the political and economic conditions and systems in which knowledge about environmental hazards, as well as exposures themselves, is produced.