Environmental Justice

This special issue on Cumulative Impacts and Government Decision Making is a first-of-its-kind collection of scholarship in this critically important area of public health and environmental justice. Pulling together scholarship that documents practice, policy, and research on the issue is both important and timely. Clearly, there exists a substantial body of practice associated with this important issue. While this work is still in development, its contours are beginning to take shape and make it possible to garner lessons from actual practice to help guide current and future efforts. To help facilitate such a process, we put forward, in this overview article, the idea of a fit-for-purpose continuum as a structured approach for better understanding, tracking, promoting, and identifying elements of success regarding progress in the development and implementation of analytical and policy approaches. The articles in this special issue fall into three categories, that is, (1) breakthroughs in policy and decision making, (2) growing sophistication in developing and implementing analytical tools and methods, and (3) emerging areas of science and research. They represent cross-cutting scholarship on the part of community activists, academicians, and government officials and serve as models for advancing future multi-sector and multi-disciplinary collaboration.

In 2020, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed a landmark environmental justice (EJ) law (S. 232) focused on cumulative impacts in the permitting process. In April 2023, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection finalized the rules that implement the law and are codified in the state’s administrative code. The precedent-setting law included a mandate to deny or condition certain environmental permits based on cumulative impacts in EJ or “overburdened” communities. This groundbreaking law became a model for states and EJ advocates nationwide seeking similar protections, with several states following suit. The process for developing the law and subsequent rules includes critical elements that may be instructive for future policymaking. These elements include a novel methodology for defining EJ communities, combining multiple stressors, and determining cumulative impact thresholds, all developed in close consultation with EJ advocates. This case study of New Jersey’s EJ law focuses on the perspectives of key EJ advocates inside the coalition that helped to develop and pass the law. It details the evolution of the policy from model bill to rulemaking (2000–2023), including (1) diverse policy approaches, (2) the unique political and movement landscape that enabled the successful passage of the law in New Jersey, (3) technical and legal considerations, and (4) coalition building and organizing efforts. This case study highlights the importance of EJ movement leadership in crafting the methodologies and shaping the decision-making and organizing that can implement effective cumulative impacts policies.

This article considers efforts to understand and respond to cumulative impacts of environmental burdens in Chicago, Illinois, to explore the efficacy of mapping as a policy tool to prevent and even reverse the disproportionate distribution of cumulative environmental burdens. It is well established that maps incorporated into formal laws and policies directly contributed to the U.S. environmental burdens landscape, spatially concentrating polluting industries in, and redirecting environmental benefits away from, areas where government action also forced communities of color to live. The question here is: if mapping got us into this mess, can mapping get us out? Spatial data-based mapping tools such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s EJScreen can produce compelling representations of environmental justice geographies. These representations have advanced the saliency of demands for policy reform from the environmental justice movement because such maps use ostensibly objective public data to dramatic visual effect, especially when drawing comparisons to reveal profound racial and class disparities in pollution burden, ambient environmental quality, and access to environmental amenities. Cumulative impact mapping can therefore be considered a kind of counter-mapping that advances critical cartography’s key claim that maps are not neutral arbiters of truth but instead help create social realities. In recent years, Chicago advocates have harnessed counter-mapping tools to oppose specific industrial siting decisions and demand systemic reform of land use frameworks. This article offers a case study of the campaign against the proposed relocation of General Iron’s scrap metal shredder in Chicago, which deployed a counter-mapping strategy that resulted in novel, ongoing cumulative impacts policy reforms at the city and state level. This article closes with observations to inform efforts in Chicago and elsewhere to incorporate EJ counter-mapping or geographic scoring approaches into public policy decision-making processes.

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.

The environmental justice (EJ) movement has called attention to the failure of government policies to address cumulative impacts (CI), the multiple and compounding social and environmental stressors that disproportionately affect low-income communities and communities of color. In recent years, driven by the organizing of EJ groups, there has been a proliferation, not only of CI mapping tools, but also of policy proposals to address CI in permitting, particularly at the state level. For the purpose of informing these efforts, we developed a database of state policies that codify a CI requirement in permitting decisions. Through web searches, consultation of existing databases, and direct knowledge, we collected state policies up through September 2024. Data were summarized on their purpose, scope of application, community definitions, and methodologies. The database includes information from eight states that have codified CI considerations in permitting decisions and 11 states with bills that have not passed. Our analysis reveals the design choices that arise in CI lawmaking and rulemaking, which may influence the efficacy of protections. A critical decision point is the strength of the legal mandate to deny permits, but we also documented multiple ways in which even a strong mandate can be diluted. We found many policy features offering opportunities to cater to local context, even while existing policies can serve as models. Moreover, we observed rulemaking to be a critical and not merely “technical” counterpart of legislation, needed not just for making implementation possible, but also for knowing the ultimate strength of the policy.

In recent years, in response to environmental justice (EJ) advocacy, some states have passed laws directing agencies to assess cumulative impacts (CIs) during environmental permit review and, in some cases, to deny permits that would increase CIs in disproportionately impacted areas. This type of regulatory reform is often characterized as the “gold standard” or “holy grail” of EJ policy implementation. Addressing CIs within regulatory decision making entails significant challenges, including technical uncertainties (data gaps, incommensurable data, and conflicting interpretations of existing data) and subjective points of decision making about how to proceed in the context of such technical uncertainties. How agencies address these challenges shapes how well these laws’ implementation supports EJ. However, government materials and media coverage about these CI laws and regulations have said little about these challenges and how agencies will address them, thereby shielding these issues from public debate. EJ advocates, in contrast, argue that agencies should use the precautionary principle to help navigate these technical uncertainties and subjective points of decision making. In this article, we build upon that work by identifying what it could mean to operationalize precaution within CI policy implementation. To do so, we draw on examples of the integration of CI assessment into environmental permit review—specifically, the new CI laws and regulations of New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and Minnesota. We identify how precaution is operationalized within these CI laws and regulations, and how this can be done more fully to better support EJ.