Confronting Cumulative Impacts: Lessons from California’s Community Air Protection Program in West Oakland

Abstract

The concept of cumulative impacts has long influenced California’s statutory environmental framework. In 2017, the passage of Assembly Bill (AB) 617 created a cumulative exposure monitoring and emissions reduction program that applies these methods to improve air quality at the community scale. As in other areas of public policy, environmental justice leaders associated with AB 617 reject the narrow framework of traditional risk assessment and instead emphasize the lived experience of cumulative impacts as influenced through the ongoing legacies of redlining and structural racism. The AB 617 Blueprint, which guides implementation of the policy by the California Air Resources Board and the state’s regional air districts, and the subsequent Blueprint 2.0 were developed with significant influence from environmental justice community leaders. A significant body of research has identified race as one of the strongest predictors of poor air quality. A cumulative impact assessment framework that recognizes structural and systemic racism as the root cause of environmental injustice, in concert with an innovative legal tool, such as AB 617, that requires a focus on communities affected by a high cumulative exposure burden, can result in more just outcomes. Our objective in this article is to use a case study of AB 617 implementation in West Oakland to examine how key elements of AB 617, such as cumulative impacts analysis, co-governance, a whole-of-government approach, community-centered strategies and actions, and equitable resource allocation, have resulted in important gains for overburdened communities. Along with these important achievements, lessons learned include the need for improved regulation of land use and inter-agency collaboration to advance and sustain meaningful reductions in cumulative environmental disparities.