The Next Test for Environmental Justice Policy? Defining ‘Disadvantaged Communities.’
- Author: Emily Pontecorvo
- Full Title: The Next Test for Environmental Justice Policy? Defining ‘Disadvantaged Communities.’
- Type: #snippet✂️
- Tags: #environmentaljustice
- URL: https://grist.org/equity/new-york-environmental-justice-policy-defining-disadvantaged-communities-clcpa-justice40/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=daily
Highlights
- The unpaid advisory group, which includes the leaders of community organizations from across the state, has a much more complicated task. It involves not only deciding on a set of criteria for the definition, but also choosing the data points that will measure that criteria, and then working out how to combine those data points to score and rank every community in the state. These technical decisions will determine which of New York’s census tracts will be prioritized for pollution cleanup, clean energy programs, job training, public transportation improvements, and energy efficiency upgrades that lower utility bills — and which will not. (View Highlight)
- The working group has had to wrestle with the limitations of key data sets, a bias toward urban areas in existing metrics, and the reality that even the best definition cannot alone overcome local resource and capacity constraints that might prevent the most disadvantaged communities from accessing funding. (View Highlight)
- First, they need ingredients: in this case, geographic data sets that measure different types of disadvantages that communities experience. These might be measures of certain air and water pollutants like benzene, concentrations of health problems like asthma, socioeconomic vulnerabilities like poverty and race, or climate change-related risks like future flood projections. One of the first things the working group did when they began meeting late last summer was brainstorm as many of these “ingredients” as they could. The initial list included more than 150. (View Highlight)
- The program requires major greenhouse gas emitters to pay into a climate investments fund, and 25 percent of the fund’s grants must go to DACs.
California developed its own environmental justice mapping tool, called CalEnviroscreen, which can be used to compare the cumulative burdens communities face throughout the state. The state uses that tool to identify DACs, drawing on 20 different criteria and grouping them into two main categories: pollution burden and population characteristics. An average score is calculated for each of the two categories for every census tract in the state, and then those scores are multiplied — the logic being that an individual’s socioeconomic and personal health status can exacerbate the risk of pollution exposures. For example, asthmatics are more sensitive to air pollution than non-asthmatics, and poor people tend to have less access to health care to address pollution-related illnesses. (View Highlight)
- The New York working group is leaning toward dividing its criteria into two very similar categories to be multiplied together: burdens and vulnerabilities. Burdens would include things like pollution, historical discriminatory practices like redlining, and climate change risks like extreme heat and flooding projections. Vulnerabilities would include socioeconomic factors and health issues like asthma. (View Highlight)
- In the meeting, Bautista wrestled with the consequences of deliberately allotting fewer DACs to his city. On the one hand, New York City has more than 1.3 million people living below the poverty line. On the other, it has more resources to meet poor communities’ needs: In 2019, New York City’s budget per capita was about $10,000. Buffalo, New York, which is one of the poorest cities in the country, had a per capita budget of just under $2,000. (View Highlight)