How science could help America’s quest for environmental justice
When US President Joe Biden took office in 2021, he put environmental justice – the quest to address pollution and other harms that disproportionately affect the health of marginalized communities – at the top of her domestic agenda. Over the past decade, American researchers and activists have worked with city and state officials to develop a range of scientific tools, from maps and models to air pollution sensors, that can be used to identify those who are most threatened by a variety of social, geographic and historical inequalities. They are now pushing the Biden administration to keep its promise.
The cornerstone of the administration’s strategy — the Justice40 initiative — promises that 40% of federal government investments in climate and clean energy will go to underprivileged communities. These may be impoverished communities close to polluting industrial facilities or neighborhoods racially segregated due to decades-old discriminatory housing policies. There is no fixed definition, but the administration must establish criteria to determine which communities are eligible.
The White House has developed a screening tool to guide Justice40 investments that takes into account aggravating factors, such as a community’s air pollution levels, its proximity to industrial facilities and polluting roads, and socio-economic data. -economic, such as wealth and education. But critics say it does not provide a way to adequately assess the full “cumulative burden” of environmental and social injustices facing communities. It also does not incorporate direct information about race and ethnicity.
“The biggest driver of environmental injustice in this country is racism,” says Sacoby Wilson, who directs the Center for Community Engagement, Environmental Justice and Health at the University of Maryland at College Park. “You can’t fight environmental injustice without fighting race.”
The Biden administration has pledged to update the tool based on feedback it receives and evolving research.
Scientists have previously worked with state and city-level regulators to develop screening tools for environmental justice — a movement that gained momentum following nationwide protests against police brutality and racial discrimination after that police in Minneapolis, Minnesota murdered George Floyd two years ago. The tools remain a work in progress, and researchers are racing to improve the data that feeds the models, including developing new ways to measure street-by-street air pollution. Environmental justice advocates hope the work will eventually guide environmental law enforcement and regulatory decisions about where and how polluting facilities are allowed to operate.
“We’re looking for regulatory change, and anything less than that won’t be progress,” says Peggy Shepard, who leads WE ACT for Environmental Justice, an advocacy group in New York, and sits on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. .
Screening for injustices
All eyes are on New Jersey, who enacted the most powerful environmental justice law in the United States less than four months after Floyd’s death. Developed with the help of researchers and activists, the statute requires environmental regulators to consider the cumulative burden of communities when issuing permits to facilities that will produce pollution. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection is set to propose regulations that will guide implementation of the law as early as June 6.
The law will come into effect when regulators take into account any community in which at least 35% of households have low income or in which at least 40% of residents are from minority ethnic groups or have limited English proficiency. If a permit application is submitted by a scrap metal processing facility or hazardous waste facility wishing to build in such “overcrowded” communities, regulators must use a geo-mapping tool to examine more than 30 additional factors, including air pollution data and information on existing facilities and infrastructure. According to an early draft of the pending regulations, if most of those stressors are also above average, officials should deny the company a permit.
What makes New Jersey’s law unique is the power it gives its regulators, says Ana Baptista, associate director of the Tishman Environment and Design Center at The New School in New York. State and federal agency officials have long argued that they lack explicit legal authority to perform this type of analysis when developing rules, and have also raised technical questions about how to quantify the social and environmental effects. New Jersey law expressly grants this power and establishes a process for cumulative impact assessment.
“It took a group of academics and environmental justice activists to put something together and break this deadlock,” says Baptista, who worked with state lawmakers to craft the legislation. “It will be a real test of political will once you start saying no to the industry.”
Regulators across the country — including at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Washington DC — are watching how New Jersey designs and implements its program — as well as how the inevitable legal challenges unfold. take place in court once the state denies permits. “They’re going to teach us a lot,” says Kristie Ellickson, an environmental scientist with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency in St. Paul.
Even efforts like those in New Jersey are only as good as the information that feeds them. The network of US monitoring stations that detect air pollution only picks up broad trends across cities and regions, and is not equipped to assess air quality at street and neighborhood levels. . Environmental scientists are therefore exploring ways to fill the gaps.
In a NASA-funded project, researchers are developing methods to assess pollution at street level using measurements of aerosols and other contaminants from space. When the team trained their tools on Washington DC, scientists discovered1 that the southeastern sections of the city, which have a greater share of black residents, are exposed to much higher levels of fine soot pollution than the wealthier – and whiter – areas of the northwest of the city, mainly due to the presence of main roads and bus depots in the southeast.
The detailed pollution data painted a more accurate picture of the burden on a community that also lacks access to high-quality medical facilities and has high rates of cardiovascular disorders and other illnesses. The results help explain a difference in life expectancy of more than 15 years between predominantly white neighborhoods and some predominantly black ones.
The analysis underscores the need to consider pollution and socio-economic data in parallel, says Susan Anenberg, director of the Climate and Health Institute at George Washington University in Washington DC and co-lead of the project. “We can actually get neighborhood-scale observations from space, which is pretty amazing,” she says, “but if you don’t have the demographic, economic, and health data as well, you’re missing a very important piece of the puzzle.”
Other projects, including one by technology company Aclima, in San Francisco, Calif., focus on ubiquitous, low-cost sensors that measure air pollution at street level. Over the past several years, Aclima has deployed a fleet of vehicles to collect street-level data on air pollutants such as soot and greenhouse gases in 101 municipalities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their data showed that air pollution levels can vary by up to 800% from block to block.
Working directly with disadvantaged communities and environmental regulators in California, as well as other states and localities, the company provides pollution monitoring on a subscription basis. It also offers the use of its Screening Tool, which incorporates a suite of socio-economic data and can be used to assess cumulative impacts.
Although city and state level regulators are beginning to rise to the challenge of determining the cumulative burden, scientists and activists say action at the federal level will be crucial. Responsibility for this task lies primarily with EPA chief Michael Regan, who has engaged with activists and promised make environmental justice “a central driver in everything we do”.
In April, Regan committed to preparing a comprehensive Environmental Justice Framework, which the agency plans to release in September 2023. Matthew Tejeda, who heads the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice, says the agency is working with states such as New Jersey and is reviewing its own programs, which are currently governed by multiple laws that do not expressly address the issue of environmental justice. A lesson from states, he says, is that cumulative effects assessment need not be as complex as people generally assume.
“We have a lot more science out there than I think most people would immediately recognize,” he says, adding that now is the time to move on to the “nuts and bolts.”
Environmental justice leaders are hopeful, but they’ve been here before: the EPA has been talking about environmental justice for three decades, to no avail. Shepard says progress is really a matter of political and scientific will, and whether society is willing to acknowledge the plight of disadvantaged communities and take corrective action.
“We put in satellites and we go to the moon,” she says. “Are you really trying to tell me that you don’t know how to assess cumulative impacts?