Why CA’s New Pollution Tool Frustrates Environmental Justice Groups

from Alejandra Reyes-VelardeCalMatters

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California is again updating the system it uses to decide which polluted communities get cleanup funding. The tool, CalEnviroScreen, has already targeted billions of dollars to the state’s busiest neighborhoods, but critics say it still overlooks some.

The update reignites a long-simmering debate: Officials promise they’re listening to communities more than ever, while advocates say gaps in the state’s data leave some areas invisible to the system meant to help them.

What’s new

Officials with the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, the state agency that administers the tool, said they worked with eight public organizations to design this fifth update – including the Coalition for the Protection of the Environment, the UNIDOS Network and the Comite Civico del Valle. The update adds two metrics: prevalence of diabetes, as people with diabetes are more vulnerable to air pollution; and small sites with toxic air, to track additional risks from sources such as urban oil wells and dry cleaning.

EnviroScreen also includes data improvements among some of the 21 other indicators it uses, such as adding children’s blood lead levels to a risk assessment of residential lead exposure. The state will hold virtual and in-person public meetings this month to gather feedback; officials said they expect to release a final version in the summer.

“We’re listening to stakeholders, community groups, academia, government agencies to understand all the new layers that may be needed to better characterize both the severity of pollution and the vulnerability of the population,” said Alvaro Alvarado, the environmental agency’s supervising toxicologist. “It’s a work in progress.”

State law requires that at least 25 percent of California cap-and-invest funds — money raised through greenhouse gas auctions — go to the most disadvantaged communities. Since 2014, the state has used CalEnviroScreen to define them, including the top 25% of census tracts in that definition.

Laura August, a program manager for the environmental protection agency, said the update doesn’t dramatically change the census tracts identified as some of the most polluted. She said the Bay Area and Central Valley fell slightly in the rankings. About 80 percent of communities designated as disadvantaged remain unchanged in the new update, she said.

How the tool works and what it lacks

Disadvantaged communities have received at least 5.8 billion dollars in cap and invest funds since 2015.

Environmental advocates said that while the tool is basic and provides important resources, it still leaves out important information. Some critics want to see additional indicators, such as tree canopy cover and wildfire smoke data.

“There needs to be ground truth work … which is literally walking around the neighborhood and counting and calculating all the different sources of pollution (and stressors) like heat islands and lack of tree cover and water stress,” said Rebecca Overmeyer-Velásquez, coordinator of the Clean Air Coalition of North Whittier and Avocado Heights.

State environmental officials said they plan to include climate data and data on pollution magnets, such as warehouses, in future versions of the tool.

Questions about the methodology

In addition to what data to include, the researchers also question whether the instrument’s design itself creates blind spots.

In 2024 researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that the previous version of the tool, CalEnviroScreen 4.0, was subjective enough to cause certain communities to lose billions of dollars.

“If you’re the developer of the model, even if you don’t think you have any personal bias or think about it, all these choices you make when you make the model, you’re implicitly deciding who gets funding and who doesn’t,” said Benjamin Huynh, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

For example, the current version of CalEnviroScreen includes data on asthma emergency room visits as an indicator of how sensitive people in a particular area are to air pollution. But some people, including immigrants, are less likely than others to visit an emergency room—or even to visit doctors in the first place to be diagnosed.

August said the agency took the researchers’ criticism seriously. Late last year, she and other government scientists defended the tool in a published report, finding that the State’s methods “prioritize generalizability, distribution, and use without sacrificing accuracy.”

Advocates want real change

But even with improvements in data, advocates said the bigger problem is how the tool is used — or not used.

CalEnviroScreen was a product, in part, of advocacy by environmental justice leaders in the 1990s. But advocates said they weren’t sure whether the programs funded by the money were actually reducing pollution, and the agencies weren’t using the tool aggressively enough in their own policies.

Bradley Angel, director of the environmental group Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, accused the state of not using the tool to deny waste permits to polluters.

“It’s great that CalEnviroScreen exists … but when communities and environmental justice groups advocated for what became CalEnviroScreen, they weren’t looking at dollar signs. They wanted to protect our health,” Angell said.

Government agencies use the tool in some policy decisions. The Air Resources Board uses EnviroScreen to determine which communities will be part of it Community air protection program that aims to reduce air pollution.

According to a draft regulation, Department of Toxic Substances Control officials said it would use CalEnviroScreen as a surrogate for cumulative impacts in resolution decisions. But environmental advocates called the regulation flawed because those impacts cannot prevent the department from issuing a hazardous waste permit.

“Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, (the department) pays lip service to CalEnviroScreen’s own information,” Angell said.

A look at other countries

At least one more state is proving that more aggressive responses to environmental justice metrics are possible, advocates said.

New Jersey developed a data tool influenced by CalEnviroScreen. two years ago New Jersey began demanding polluting facilities to use its tool to analyze the cumulative impacts of different sources of pollution in a given community. State regulators should deny permits to facilities that cannot avoid harm to overburdened communities.

“A tool is just a tool,” said Caroline Farrell, director of the Environmental Law and Justice Clinic at Golden Gate University. “You have to be able to figure out how you want to use it in a way that actually makes a difference on the ground for communities.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.