The White House released last week a beta version to guide the implementation of its highly-publicized tool. Justice40 program. Justice40 promises that at most 40% of the government’s benefits on infrastructure, clean energy and other climate-related programs, will be directed towards disadvantaged communities. The Climate and Economic Justice Screening ToolCEJST, or Community Empowerment and Justice for the Disadvantaged, is meant to address a difficult question: Which communities are flagged as being disadvantaged?
The tool, which took more than a year to develop, considers 21 different climate and economic indicators. To be considered disabled, a community must be above 65th percentile in terms o its low-income population, and must also be in the 90% or higher in one of the health or environmental indicators.
Despite its strong and well-documented correlation to environmental burdens, race is a striking absence from the tools list of indicators. The Biden administration has come. Environmental justice advocates are under fireOfficials say that the tool cannot exclude racial groups, but officials state that it can still prioritize communities in color (and without becoming a target of legal challenges).
A Grist analysis shows that there is strong evidence to support the administration’s reassurances. The tool seems to implicitly account race in its selections of disadvantaged communities. The White House tool considers a tract more likely to be considered economically disadvantaged if it has more non-white residents. This is evident from a breakdown of all U.S. census tracks. This is because many of the criteria used by the tool, such as proximity to hazardous facilities, language isolation, and proximity traffic, are effectively proxies for race.
The tool confirms what environmental justice advocates had long argued: Race is a powerful predictor of pollution burdens. It prioritizes communities with the highest pollution burdens and automatically prioritizes communities of color.
Manuel Pastor, the director of Equity Research Institute at University of Southern California, said that the tool they developed is highly correlated to race. Pastor reviewed Grists findings. He said that the analysis revealed the sad truth that there are significant environmental disparities in the United States.
A spokesperson for the White House Council on Environmental Quality stated that racism and race are factors that have contributed to the country’s pollution problems. The tool uses socioeconomic as well as environmental data to show which communities have a greater share of climate risks and environmental burdens. The spokesperson stated that the tool will be continually updated and refined based in part on feedback and research.
The tool flags nearly a third of the 73,000 census tracts in the United States as disadvantaged. The tool flags tracts that have a higher proportion of non-white residents as more likely to be flagged. However, it also flags 3,500 tracts where 20% or less of the population identify themselves as nonwhite. The tool also leaves out tracts where more than 2200 residents identify as non-white.
The White House’s race-neutral approach to racism is based on a similar approach taken in California. California, which was forced to eliminate affirmative action from state funding by a ballot initiative, developed an environmental justice screening system that does not take into account race or ethnicity. But, there are some exceptions. Analysis of the tools’ impactIt was found to be in line with racial demographics. It was also used to funnel money to communities of color.
Alvaro Sanchez, vice president of policy at The Greenlining Institute, an environmental justice non-profit based in Oakland California, stated that race should not be considered as a factor. Sanchez was a Grist Fixer in 2019. Nevertheless, Sanchez said that Californias experience showed that with the right methodology, you’re able to still identify those communities that are most in need, even if you’re not able to use race.
There are many differences between the White House’s new tool and California’s. The White House tool doesn’t consider the cumulative effects from various socioeconomic, environmental, and health burdens. This could lead to a greater burden than any indicator might suggest. Instead, the tool only assesses eight categories. All eight categories combine an income metric with other environmental, climate, and health metrics. A community is considered to be disadvantaged if it meets the income threshold and any other threshold in any of the eight categories.
For example, the tool considers a tract to be low income if it’s above the 65th per centile in the Income criteria. If a tract’s health burden is greater than the 90th percentile of asthma, diabetes, heart disease, and low life expectancy, it is considered high-risk. Pastor called these thresholds arbitrary.
These thresholds can cause certain communities to be disqualified despite their being very similar to their disadvantaged neighbors. Take census tract 66603 in San Bernardino County, California. The new federal tool does not classify the tract as being in disadvantage, but it is surrounded on all sides with tracts that are. Nearly 6,000 people live within the boundaries of the tract, and 83 per cent of them identify as people of colour. The tract ranks in the 96th and 91st percentiles for exposure to fine particulate matter in the atmosphere, respectively. There are several hazardous facilities within 5 km. The tool does not flag the community as being disadvantaged, however, because it is in the 62nd per centile for low income metrics. The tool cutoff is 65th percentile or higher.
The tool flagged a neighboring tract with a similar environmental burden. It was in the 68th percentile of low income, which allowed it to surpass the tool’s cutoff line.
Sanchez said that California encountered a similar problem while developing its screening tool. Some census tracts were located in the midst of disadvantaged tracts, but they weren’t being flagged by the tool as disadvantaged despite having similar problems on the ground. (After all, air pollution does not respect census tract boundaries.) The state amended the rule to ensure that a certain percentage of funding was used in low-income census tracts located within a radius of half a mile of a disadvantaged community.
Sanchez and Pastor stressed the need to engage more with the community as the White House works to finalize the tool over the next few months. Pastor said that California held meetings to get feedback from residents. The messy process of creating this methodology was also influenced by community members. The tool received a lot of support when it was completed. The state agencies responsible for the tool hosted webinars to help people use the tool, conducted tours in California, and held many meetings.
Sanchez stated that California’s approach was very different to the White Houses. Unfortunately, the White House tool is a lot less inclusive and transparent, and it’s leaving a lot of question marks, he said.
The White House established an online community to promote transparency in the process of building the tool. During the year that the tool was being developed, a number of software developers, environmental justice activists, scientists, and employees from federal agencies joined regular calls and contributed code. As the tool was developing, the code that powers it was routinely updated. Published on GitHub, a public code-hosting site.
The tool’s website also offers feedback options. A notice has been posted. Published in the Federal RegisterRequest public comment on the tool before April 25. A spokesperson for White House said that the review of feedback on the tool was a key part and that they welcome any feedback in the coming days. According to them, the goal is to improve accuracy of the tool in capturing America’s most overburdened or underserved communities.
