Why activists say this AC pollution-fighting tool is insufficient

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California is again updating the system it uses to decide which contaminated communities get cleanup funds. The tool, CalEnviroScreen, has already directed billions of dollars to the state’s most affected neighborhoods, but critics say it still ignores 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 make 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 have cooperated with eight public organizations to be designed this Kinta update among them the Coalition for the Protection of the Environment, the UNIDOS network and the Valle Civic Committee. The update adds two indicators: the prevalence of diabetes, as people with diabetes are more vulnerable to air pollution; and small atmospheric toxicity sites, to track additional risks from sources such as urban oil wells and dry cleaning.

EnviroScreen also includes data improvements for some of the other 21 indicators it uses, such as including children’s blood lead levels in an assessment of the risk of lead exposure in the home. The state will hold virtual and in-person public meetings this month to gather input; Officials said they hope to release the final version in the summer.

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

State law requires that at least 25% of California cap-and-invest program 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, the agency’s environmental program manager, said the update doesn’t dramatically change the census tracts identified as among the most polluted. He added that 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, he added.

How the tool works and what it lacks

Disadvantaged communities have received at least 5.8 billion dollars in capitalization and investment funds since 2015.

Environmental advocates said that while the tool is essential and provides key resources, it still misses relevant information. Some critics want to see additional indicators, such as tree cover and wildfire smoke data.

“It’s going to take a field check job … that literally goes around the neighborhood and counts and calculates all the different sources of pollution (and stressors), like heat islands, lack of tree cover and water stress,” said Rebecca Overmeyer-Velásquez, coordinator of the North Whittier and Avocado Heights Clean Air Coalition.

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 methodology

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

In 2024 researchers at Johns Hopkins University They 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 feel like you have personal bias or think about it, all those decisions you make when you create the model, you’re implicitly deciding who gets funded 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 emergency room visits for asthma as an indicator of the susceptibility of people in an area to air pollution. However, some people, including immigrants, are less likely than others to go to the emergency room or even see a doctor for a diagnosis.

August said the agency took the researchers’ criticism seriously. Late last year, she and other government scientists defended the tool in a published report, concluding that state methods “prioritize generalizability, dissemination, and use without sacrificing precision.”

Activists want real change

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

CalEnviroScreen was a product, in part, of pressure from environmental justice leaders in the 1990s. But advocates said they weren’t sure whether the programs funded with that 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, criticized the state for 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 the money. They were looking at protecting our health,” Angel said.

Government agencies use this tool in some policy decisions. The Air Resources Board uses EnviroScreen to determine which communities will be part of its program Community air protection whose aim is to reduce air pollution.

According to a draft ordinance, Department of Toxic Substances Control officials said they will use CalEnviroScreen as an indicator of cumulative impacts in resolution decisions. Environmental activists, however, called the regulation flawed because such impacts cannot prevent the department from issuing a hazardous waste permit.

“Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, (the department) just ignored CalEnviroScreen’s own information,” Angel said.

A look at other countries

At least one other state has demonstrated that more aggressive responses to environmental justice metrics are possible, advocates said.

New Jersey has developed a data tool based on CalEnviroScreen. two years ago New Jersey began demanding polluting facilities that will use this tool to analyze the cumulative impact of different sources of pollution in a given community. State regulators should deny permits to facilities that cannot prevent harm to affected 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 know how to use it so that it really generates real change for communities.”