How science could help America’s search for environmental justice

When US President Joe Biden took office in 2021, he put environmental justice - the search for solutions to pollution and other damages that disproportionately affect the health of marginalized communities - at the top of his domestic agenda. Over the past decade, U.S. 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 most at risk from various social, geographical 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 the federal government’s investment in climate and clean energy will go to disadvantaged communities. This could include poor communities near polluting industrial facilities or racially segregated neighborhoods due to decades of discriminatory housing policies. There is no specific definition, but the administration must set criteria to determine which communities are eligible.

The White House has developed a Justice 40 investment targeting screening tool that takes into account deteriorating factors such as levels of community air pollution, its proximity to industrial facilities and polluting roads, and socioeconomic data 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 that communities face. Nor does it include direct information on race and ethnicity.

“The main driver of environmental injustice in this country is racism,” said Sacobi Wilson, who runs the Center for Community Engagement, Environmental Justice and Health at the University of Maryland in College Park. “You can’t deal with environmental injustice without dealing with race.

The Biden administration has pledged to update the tool based on the feedback it has received and development research.

Scientists have already worked with state and city regulators to develop screening tools for environmental justice - a movement that gained momentum after national protests against police brutality and racial discrimination after Minneapolis, Minnesota police killed George Floyd two years ago. before. The tools are still ongoing, and researchers are rushing to improve the data entered into the models, including the development of new ways to measure air pollution street by street. Proponents of environmental justice hope that this work will ultimately lead to the implementation of environmental laws and regulatory decisions on where and how polluting facilities are allowed to operate.

“We are looking for regulatory change, and there will be no less than that,” said Peggy Shepard, who heads the ACT for Environmental Justice, an advocacy group in New York, and is a member of the White House Advisory Council on Environmental Justice.

Screening for injustice

All eyes are on New Jersey, which passed the most powerful environmental justice law in the United States less than four months after Floyd’s death. Made with the help of researchers and activists, the statute requires environmental regulators to take into account the cumulative burden on communities when issuing permits for facilities that will produce pollution. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection is ready to propose regulations that will guide how the law is applied as early as June 6.

The statute will come into force when regulators consider any community in which at least 35% of households have low incomes or in which at least 40% are residents of minority ethnic groups or have limited knowledge of English. If a permit application is submitted by a scrap metal processing plant or a hazardous waste facility that wants to be built in such “overburdened” communities, regulators must use a geographic mapping tool to review more than 30 additional factors, including air pollution data and information on existing facilities and infrastructure. According to the early draft regulations that are pending, if most of these stressors are also higher than average, officials must deny the company permission.

What makes New Jersey law unique is the power it gives its regulators, says Ana Baptista, assistant director of the Tishman Center for the Environment and Design at New School in New York City. Officials in state and federal agencies have long argued that they do not have explicit legal authority to perform this type of analysis when drafting rules, and have also raised technical questions about how to quantify social and environmental effects. The New Jersey Statute explicitly gives those powers and sets out the process for assessing cumulative impacts.

“It took a bunch of academics and environmental activists to put something together and break that deadlock,” said Baptista, who worked with state lawmakers to develop the law. “It will be a real test of political will when you start saying no to industry.

Regulators across the country - including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Washington - are watching New Jersey design and implement its program - as well as the inevitable legal challenges unfold in court when the state refuses a permit. “They’re going to teach us a lot,” said Christy Elikson, an environmental scientist at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency in St. Paul.

Better data

Even efforts like New Jersey are only as good as the information that is put into them. The network of American monitoring stations that detect air pollution captures only broad trends in cities and regions and is not equipped to assess air quality at the level of streets and settlements. So environmental scientists are exploring ways to fill in the gaps.

In a NASA-funded project, researchers are developing methods to estimate street-level pollution using measurements of aerosols and other pollutants from space. When the team trained its tools in Washington, the scientists discovered¹ that parts of the southeast of the city, which have a higher share of Montenegrin population, are exposed to much higher levels of soot pollution than richer - and whiter - areas in the northwest of the city, primarily due to the presence of main roads and bus station in the southeast.

Detailed data on pollution gave a more accurate picture of the burden on the community, which also does not have access to high-quality medical facilities and has a high rate of cardiovascular disorders and other diseases. The results help to explain the difference in more than 15 years in life expectancy between predominantly white settlements and some predominantly black settlements.

The analysis underscores the need to consider pollution and socioeconomic data at the same time, says Susan Annenberg, director of the Institute for Climate and Health at George Washington University in Washington and co-leader of the project. “We can actually get neighborhood-level observations from space, which is pretty amazing,” she says, “but if you don’t have demographics, economic and health data, you’re missing a very important part of the puzzle.”

Other projects, including that of technology company Aclima, in San Francisco, California, focus on ubiquitous, low-cost sensors that measure street-level air pollution. Over the past few 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 up to 800% from one block to another.

Working directly with disadvantaged communities and environmental regulators in California, as well as other states and localities, the company provides subscription-based pollution monitoring. It also offers the use of its own screening tool, which integrates a set of socio-economic data and can be used to assess cumulative impacts.

An increase

Although regulators at the city and state levels are beginning to approach the challenge of determining the cumulative burden, scientists and activists say action at the federal level will be crucial. The responsibility for this task lies largely with EPA chief Michael Reagan, who has worked with activists and vowed to make environmental justice “a central driver in everything we do.”

In April, Reagan pledged to prepare a comprehensive framework for environmental protection and justice, which the agency plans to release in September 2023. Matthew Tejeda, who heads the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice, says the agency works with states like New Jersey and revises its programs, which are currently regulated by multiple statutes that do not explicitly address the issue of environmental justice. One lesson from states, he says, is that assessing cumulative effects doesn’t have to be as complex as people generally assume.

“We have a lot more science there than I think most people would recognize right away,” he says, adding that now is the time to move on to “screws and nuts.”

Leaders of environmental justice hope, but they have been here before: the EPA has been talking about environmental justice for three decades without much benefit. Shepard says that progress is really a matter of political and scientific will, and whether the society is ready to recognize the troubles of endangered communities and to take corrective measures.

“We’re setting up satellites and going to the moon,” she says. “Are you really trying to tell me you can’t figure out how to assess cumulative impacts?”