Abstract
Environmental data play an increasingly important role in the politics of environmental justice (EJ) in the United States. This article presents the results of a case study focused on how emissions and health data have been used by EJ advocates seeking to influence climate change legislation in California over the past two decades. These results highlight the importance of publicly accessible environmental databases. This study describes how California's Environmental Protection Agency, which was assigned responsibility for the health and welfare of EJ communities, sought to enhance the utility of the available emissions data by requiring the development of a new state analytical tool called CalEnviroScreen. This tool and methodology, which continues to be expanded and maintained by the state, were used by EJ justice advocates to influence decisions by state legislators as they developed climate-related emission reduction strategies, including a market-based cap-and-trade program. Case study implications include the importance of having “a seat at the table,” “access” to public data, and the development of analytical tools that enable EJ representatives to participate in the policymaking process. Final observations include the results of recent air quality audits that suggest that reductions in pollutants in disproportionately impacted communities in California have not yet been achieved, raising questions about the limits of data-driven approaches to achieving EJ that are not backed by enforceable pollution reduction requirements.
INTRODUCTION
The role and importance of environmental data in addressing climate change have expanded dramatically, along with questions about the justice implications associated with relying on it to navigate the climate crisis. 1 With the election of Donald Trump in 2016, critical questions about the impact of data on environmental justice (EJ) were largely shelved and replaced by an urgent effort to rescue government environmental data from a presidential administration with an unabashed hostility to scientific findings that questioned favored policy agendas. 2
The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) was formed to protect “the future of environmental science, data, and policy in the face of a virulent antiscience and antienvironment administration.” 3 Immediately after its formation, the EDGI undertook various activities to protect environmental data, such as archiving public data sets, monitoring government websites, and documenting changes within federal agencies.
EDGI's initial focus on “DataRescue” has evolved “from a project to “save” government environmental data to a broader project of rethinking the infrastructures required for community stewardship of data.” 4 With backgrounds in critical data science and social justice causes, the members of EDGI are explicit about the importance of considering “environmental data from environmental justice (EJ) and data justice (DJ) perspectives.” 5
The term “Environmental Data Justice” (EDJ) was coined by historian and EDGI member, Michelle Murphy, to help provide a framework for working through “the challenges of confronting problematic, often industry-produced, data while also striving towards the positive project of building better data practices.” 6 Through the creation of an EDJ working group, the Environmental Governance Initiative has generated reports and peer-reviewed articles that use this definition to explore the tensions between EJ and DJ in a variety of contexts. 7
In this article, the emerging literature on EDJ provides a framework for examining the specific role that data have played in the effort to integrate EJ goals into climate change policy in California. Political debates about climate policy in California provide a rich context for exploring the meaning of EDJ because of the highly visible role that emissions and health data have played in determining the outcomes of these debates.
METHODS
In 1999, the California legislature passed Senate Bill 115, becoming the first state in the nation to explicitly include EJ considerations into law. 8 This case study focuses on the evolution and development of legislation aimed at reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and other industrial pollutants in California. More specifically, I describe how the growing availability of GHG environmental databases and analytical models was used by both EJ advocates and the petroleum industry to influence decisions by state legislators as they developed emission reduction strategies, including a market-based cap-and-trade program.
Relying on over two decades of hearings and legislative sessions, I was able to observe how EJ advocates leveraged their legal standing to get appointments to various environmental boards, commissions, and committees, making it possible to advocate for reduced emissions in their communities as well as statewide. A review of the relevant reporting and opinion pieces during this timeframe provides context and additional insights into the political and economic interests of various stakeholders.
Case study implications show that mandated standing and access led to a commitment by the state to ensure that EJ interests were not overlooked and resulted in the development of the California Communities Environmental Health Screening Tool (CalEnviroScreen), a groundbreaking EJ mapping tool that identifies areas most affected by multiple forms of pollution. This tool enabled EJ advocates to focus data-driven attention on how state environmental protection and enforcement actions were impacting communities living at the intersection of pollution and poverty. 9
California was an early leader in taking steps to reduce GHG emissions, making it an ideal focus for this case study. California also has both a large and influential petroleum industry and a highly mobilized EJ community. California is third in the country in terms of refining oil, so any curtailment of these operations could have a significant impact on the state economy through lost wages, tax revenues, and reduced employment.
At the same time, many of the state's most severely impacted EJ communities, suffering from some of the worst pollution in the state and nationwide, are located near refineries. Together, these factors mean that during the time period of this case study, representatives from various EJ organizations in California actively attempted to influence how emission reductions would be achieved, providing an ideal opportunity to examine the role that environmental data can play in fostering fair and just policy solutions to the climate crisis.
RESULTS
In 2006, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger approved and signed the California Global Warming Solutions Act and Assembly Bill 32 (AB 32). 10 This act sets goals to reduce GHG emissions from all sources throughout the state. Over the next decade, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) collaborated with stakeholders to revise and update the AB 32 goals in an effort to develop regulations and laws that would enable California to balance its EJ and climate goals without adversely impacting the economy of the state.
To this end, the state established a new EJ advisory committee to advise CARB on pertinent matters related to these communities. The EJ community gained even more leverage when two additional designated appointments to the CARB were approved. The significance of EJ groups having a committee to oversee their issues translated into greater access to public officials during proceedings, which were often dominated by well-funded industrial interests. This participation also resulted in making the EJ community much more aware of the existence of publicly available data that they used to support their positions in regulatory proceedings throughout the state.
One of the unique constructs of AB 32's design, and key to its approval by the legislature and the governor, was it would be, as CARB announced, “the first-in-the-world comprehensive program of regulatory and market mechanisms achieving real, quantifiable, cost-effective reductions of greenhouse gases.” 11 Regulators made it clear that they would not rely on “command and control,” which had already been tried in California with limited success in controlling power plant emissions. 12 Instead, CARB would work with stakeholders to develop a complementary statewide cap-and-trade program to help achieve GHG reductions and, uniquely, be linked to another market program in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec.
As the details of the cap-and-trade program took shape, opposition and the threat of lawsuits from both the business and EJ communities threatened the process. EJ advocates opposed the program because they asserted that most of the large emitters of GHG and other dangerous pollutants would continue to operate under the program as designed. They wanted to have a state mandate that these large emitters stop emitting GHG emissions at their industrial sites as quickly as possible. Ultimately, the CARB approved a program that would allow large emitters in the state to decide when and how they would reduce their local emissions, a deeply disappointing turn of events for EJ advocates. 13
A specific feature of California's EJ law was that it put the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) in charge of coordinating activities to ensure that EJ issues are adequately addressed in state proceedings, programs, and legislation. 14 It was during the AB 32 proceedings that members of this committee identified major shortcomings related to studies the state was doing to assess health impacts in EJ communities. These studies focused on one chemical, one site, or plant at a time, instead of looking at the cumulative impacts on the whole community from various indicators (e.g., ozone, pesticides, hazardous waste, and impaired water).
To address this issue, the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) was tasked with building an analytical tool based on the current scientific understanding of environmental pollution and its adverse health impacts. This methodology examined the distribution of pollution and health outcomes. Over time, CalEnviroScreen, the nation's first science-based tool using data to screen and rank places and communities for relative cumulative statewide impact, was developed. 15
In 2012, guidelines were adopted along with a new impact-mapping component. Once this was done, CalEPA and OEHHA had a publicly available screening tool that had statewide coverage and the ability to analyze data, distinguish highly impacted communities, and represent results in statewide maps. They also committed to an annual update of the methodology and the screening tool.
By late 2015, data collected by EJ groups and their supporters in California began to suggest that GHG emissions and copollutants were increasing, not decreasing, in neighborhoods near oil production facilities and refineries under the cap-and-trade program. They worried that state officials were failing to provide adequate oversight of the emissions from these facilities. The EJ advocates shared their concerns with a group of researchers at the U.C. Berkeley, University of Southern California, San Francisco State University, and Occidental College, who were also interested in assessing how the program was working.
The collaboration produced a research brief, A Preliminary Environmental Equity Assessment of California's Cap-and-Trade Program. 16 The team, armed with publicly available data and CalEnviroScreen, was able to narrow its focus to, primarily, “emitter covered emissions” that lined up with localized in-state emissions (derived mostly from fossil fuels) from industries under the cap-and-trade regulations. The data showed that these facilities were located in neighborhoods with higher proportions of low-income residents of color. 17
The analysis concluded that there is little in the design of the California AB 32 cap-and-trade program that provides incentives to target the reduction of GHG emissions and copollutants from large in-state industrial facilities in low-income communities of color. The results showed that the GHG emissions from these facilities increased after the program began. As is always the case when implementing new and untested programs, policymakers and stakeholders need real-world data to help them understand what is happening and develop strategies to mitigate inequities or problems. According to these researchers, “Good quality, publicly accessible data and robust analysis” will be needed to “incentivize deeper in-state GHG reductions and that achieve both sustainability and environmental equity goals.” 18
After the initial components and goals of AB 32 were established and EJ advocates were given standing and data, they faced an uphill battle. During the 2016 and 2017 legislative sessions, the experienced, well-funded, and politically powerful California oil and petroleum industry successfully leveraged millions of dollars to ensure that Assembly Bill 398, being proposed to extend the cap-and-trade program out to 2030, would not impact the operation and profitability of the businesses they represented.
Even when armed with data demonstrating that oil refineries were impacting their communities pointing to an immediate need to regulate their pollution, EJ advocates did not prevail. Assembly Bill 398 passed with resounding support from a broad coalition of industrial, agricultural, and environmental players who believed that the program was the only way to meet California's larger GHG emission reduction goals. 19
Although EJ advocates were not able to convince the state to abandon the cap-and-trade program, their issues were not entirely ignored. In an attempt to appease these constituents, Assembly Bill 617 20 was passed; establishing the Community Air Protection Program that includes provisions for new regulations that require the development of maps and new annual reporting of criteria air pollutants and toxic air contaminant emissions. 21
These new data will help EJ communities identify specific locations where pollution burdens are concentrated and they can integrate that information into CalEnviroScreen over time. These data will help determine what pollution reduction strategies will be the most beneficial, but implementation of recommended actions remains challenging. These changes are positive, but in an extensive report on AB 617, CEJA reports AB 617 still does not result in the timely pollution and health reductions EJ communities in California deserve. 22
DISCUSSION
This case study demonstrated how the above model worked in California and allowed EJ advocates to secure pathways to pursue EJ goals through data-based local analysis. The contributions of data to achieving EJ goals in California during this period were multifaceted and evolved over time. At the beginning of the study period, data were a crucial tool for EJ advocates when it came to communicating the message that environmental health problems were real and were disproportionally impacting some of the most disadvantaged residents in the state.
Many of the advances in the status of EJ in California described in this article, such as getting standing and access, would have been significantly less likely without the existence of data validating the presence of disproportionate impacts from pollution. In this regard, data also made it possible to use the CalEnviroScreen tool to generate maps so that EJ advocates could focus on specific locations and communities where pollution and health concerns were the greatest.
The ability to produce visual representations was crucial because, as Michael Mendez points out in his discussion of this same period of climate change legislation in California, “maps offered a way to visualize advocates' concerns, which were obscured in more conventional assessments because these often focused only on individual chemicals and their sources.” 23
The relatively long history of, and legislative commitment to, EJ in California is atypical. For this reason, what has been happening in this state does not represent the status of EJ in the United States. Still, the case of California remains instructive because it demonstrates that, even in a state where there is a pre-existing and robust EJ movement, the ability to leverage data is crucial to successful advocacy because it validates and makes visible the claims being made.
In states where there is no, or very little history of, grassroots EJ activism, data are likely to be even more important. Expecting disadvantaged communities to articulate and successfully advocate for reductions in the pollution loads they are experiencing in the absence of organized assistance is unrealistic. State-sponsored tools such as CalEnviroScreen that measure and depict the impacts of environmental hazards function to remove some of this burden from communities who are often completely ill equipped to gather and interpret this type of data.
When required by law, progress was made in California by integrating EJ stakeholders into statewide policy and regulatory proceedings. As more EJ policies are passed in California, the challenge for EJ advocates and organizations representing impacted communities will be to utilize the data they ask for and report back to agencies and policymakers on how well these policies are working. At the end of the case study timeframe, a coalition of EJ community groups filed a lawsuit after they discovered that the San Joaquin Valley Unified Air Pollution Control District (District), in secret meetings, exempted petroleum refineries from monitoring their toxic emissions as required by AB 1647. 24
They were joined in this action by California's Attorney General, which sent a message that California was serious about the state's emissions monitoring mandates. On September 17, 2021, the Superior Court of California, County of Fresno, Central Division ruled in favor of the EJ communities and directed the district to develop new regulations consistent with the law that required air monitoring systems to be installed so that they could generate data useful for evaluating petroleum refinery pollution exposure levels and health risks. 25 The court stated that the data should be provided to the public as quickly as possible but did not mandate a date.
This legal decision again highlights the importance of the ongoing oversight of refinery operations in California and the necessity of providing EJ communities with the data they need to hold the state accountable for legislative commitments. Although data did not always result in clear victories for the EJ community during climate change policy fights in California, this case study offers an example of how data can be transformed into an engine of justice when deliberate choices are made about how to collect and use it to achieve social justice objectives. Beyond this general point, the case study results have several specific implications for the meaning and value of EDJ.
CONCLUSION
The term “environmental data justice” has emerged as a framework for working through the connections between the goals of EJ and DJ. According to the founders of the Environmental Data Justice Initiative (EDJI), the existence of tensions between EJ and DJ means that the application of this term to real policy debates requires paying attention to both the limits and potential of data as an effective tool to achieve EJ goals. 26 In line with this approach, the results of this case study provide a basis for developing implications that speak of both the challenges and possibilities of using data to advance EJ in other states and at the federal level.
On the positive side, this case study provides an example of the crucial role that data play in making the claims of EJ advocates visible. Data are now widely recognized as key components of political visibility. In a data-driven society, not having data on a problem, no matter how severe, can make the problem invisible. Alternatively, when there is meaningful access to it, data can be used to make what was once invisible, visible. The data clearly played a role in validating the concerns expressed by the EJ community about the disproportionate impacts that market-based climate change policies could have on disadvantaged communities in California.
During the battle over the passage of SB 32 and AB 617, the California Environmental Justice Alliance (CEJA) used a combination of data and published research to successfully convince various legislators and the governor that the communities they represented were negatively impacted by pollution and climate change.
Significantly, the data and research that CEJA relied on during the 2016 legislative session would not have existed if not for the development of CalEnviroScreen 3 years earlier. According to Zabin et al., the CalEnviroScreen tool played a crucial role in raising “the public visibility of the interests and needs of disadvantaged communities for the purposes of targeted investment from cap-and-trade revenue.” 27 The central importance of CalEnviroScreen in this case study highlights the role that government institutions must sometimes play in filling gaps in the data.
In this case study, the early recognition of data holes created by the inability to measure and assess cumulative impacts caused the state to prioritize embedding this capability into the CalEnviroScreen methodology. The ability to collect and calculate cumulative impacts enabled CEJA to fully validate its claims about the negative impacts of cap-and-trade policies on the communities they represented. Without the financial and technical resources of state regulatory agencies driving it, it is almost certain that CalEnviroScreen would not have been created, perpetuating distortions about the impacts of climate change policies while simultaneously undermining the claims of EJ advocates.
As the preceding discussion makes clear, the data generated and made available through CalEnviroScreen contributed to EJ in California by making the concerns of disproportionately impacted residents visible. However, this tool also helped highlight the limitations of data in the fight for EJ. The public availability of data through CalEnviroScreen made it possible for research scientists to investigate the impacts of climate policies on the state's most disadvantaged residents. 28
For example, utilizing the tool to explore possible “social disparities in GHG and co-pollutant emissions” under California's cap-and-trade program for 2011–2015, Cushing et al. found that the “program has not yielded improvements in environmental equity with respect to health-damaging co-pollutant emissions.” 29
Although they view the CalEnviroScreen tool as a major step forward in “building the data infrastructure needed to address equity concerns,” Zabin et al. echo the observations of Cushing et al. about the inadequacy of existing data sets. They argue that “gaps in data collection and reporting still prevent us from clearly seeing where progress is being made and where problems remain unaddressed.” Like Cushing et al., these authors insist on the need to generate “better data on cap-and-trade sources and transactions, changes in local co-pollutant emissions, job growth and loss, and job quality and access for members of disadvantaged communities.”
Furthermore, if this kind of data is not made available, they believe it will be difficult to remain accountable to the commitment “to ensure that public subsidies and ratepayer investments are fairly distributing the costs and benefits of climate policy among California's households.” 30 Reinforcing this point further was the 2016 report “A Preliminary Environmental Equity Assessment of California's Cap-And-Trade Program.” This report concluded that while emissions data have served as an important starting point for achieving EJ goals, the utility of these data is undermined by a lack of coordination in its collection, a shortage of publicly available air quality data, and failures surrounding enforcement. 31
Finally, even when good data are readily available and usable by those who are fighting for EJ, its value remains contingent on regulatory frameworks that include mechanisms for requiring and enforcing emission reductions. Despite positive reports about the impacts of AB 617 on EJ in California by organizations such as the Brookings Institute, 32 the lack of enforceable permanent emission reduction requirements ultimately contributed to the California Justice Alliance, taking the position that AB 617 should not be replicated as a national model. 33
In 2021, President Biden issued an executive order creating the “Justice40” Initiative. A major component of this initiative is the development of a “Climate and Environmental Justice Screening Tool.” 34 The model for this tool is California's “CalEnvironScreen.” Although this tool has a demonstrated track record for enhancing EJ goals in California, as illustrated by this case study, it has not been without problems. Given that it is about to be replicated throughout the nation, it is crucial to reflect on the limitations and/or problems that have arisen around the use of this tool by EJ advocates in California.
This case study showed that access to environmental data and models gave EJ advocates a seat at the table but still fell short of delivering environmental equity during the planning and implementation processes.
How EJ will be achieved in the state of California remains an open question. In 2022, the state auditor reported that California would not meet its 2030 target of reducing emissions by 40% without accelerating the pace of reductions. 35 Faced with this shortfall and continued reliance on a market-based pollution reduction model, it is clear that EJ activists, as well as medical organizations that advocate for clean air, will need to work together at both the state and federal levels to expand the development of data beyond individual state models so that EJ issues are not ignored as California struggles to meet its emission reduction goals.
On a national level, CalEnviroScreen was developed to help make EL issues visible in California, has gained wide recognition as a model for EJ screening, and has inspired Michigan, Colorado, and Washington to develop their own EJ screening tools using CalEnviroScreen as a model. The Biden administration's Justice40Initiative has also released the Climate and Economic Justice Screening tool that will provide yet more information and opportunity for environmental activists to use these tools and data to promote policies and initiatives that will finally provide relief and justice to communities most impacted by environmental hazards. 36
AUTHOR'S CONTRIBUTIONS
K.A.K. contributed to conceptualization, methodology, investigation, writing—original draft preparation, and writing—reviewing and editing.
Footnotes
AUTHOR DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No competing financial interests exist.
FUNDING INFORMATION
No funding was received for this article.