Princeton SPIA Professor Leads Analysis of Federal Tool to Address Environmental Injustice
Oct 03 2024
By
Jen DeMoss
Topics
Law, Justice, Human Rights
Source
Princeton School of Public and International Affairs
Eric Tate co-chaired a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that evaluated a tool used for environmental policy investments at a scale never previously attempted at the federal level.
When President Biden signed Executive Order 14008 in 2021, dedicated to tackling the climate crisis and advancing environmental justice, he created the Justice40 Initiative. As part of the largest-ever federal effort to ensure public access to healthy environments, Biden pledged that 40% of the overall benefits from the initiative’s $62 billion investment in climate change mitigation, clean energy and transit, environmental hazard remediation, water quality improvement, affordable and sustainable housing, and workforce development be allocated to underserved communities in the U.S. The effort will require the coordination of hundreds of programs and enormous changes to the way the federal government operates.
To identify marginalized communities for targeted funding, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) developed the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST). Like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s EJScreen and California’s CalEnviroScreen, CEJST uses social and environmental data to identify geographic areas with disproportionate levels of pollution and climate impacts, fewer resources, health and income inequalities, and other forms of inequity and underinvestment. Eric Tate, professor of public affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), was co-chair of a National Academies study released in August that assessed the efficacy of CEJST in identifying communities with the highest economic and environmental burdens. The study, “Constructing Valid Geospatial Tools for Environmental Justice,” outlines methods for any organization to develop more accurate geospatial tools for environmental justice.
“CEJST is potentially the most influential federal policy tool ever put in place to redress environmental injustice. If you’re going to use a tool like this to say which communities are prioritized for resources and which aren’t, you have to be sure it’s accurately measuring what you want it to.”Eric Tate, professor of public affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs
The committee scanned existing geospatial tools, critically analyzed gaps in the data informing CEJST and its structure, and made suggestions for the development of CEJST and other environmental justice tools. SPIA doctoral student Shelley Hoover organized the scan of environmental justice tools and helped design a public workshop.
The committee determined that CEJST should employ a transparent framework for defining terms and the indicators. An imprecise definition of “disadvantaged community” could leave gaps in the tool’s analysis and overlook places in dire need of investment. During a public workshop in which representatives of community organizations, city government researchers, and others experimented with CEJST’s ability to evaluate economic and environmental burdens faced by residents in familiar neighborhoods, the committee found that CEJST didn’t always reflect participants’ real-life experiences. Tate and his colleagues recommended that CEQ develop an explicit framework for defining eligible communities and analyze the indicators used to identify them alongside community members.
They also recommended cumulative burden scoring — tallying the number of social and environmental burdens each community faced — to help CEQ identify areas facing multiple burdens. Multiple burdened areas tend to have greater racial disparities, and a cumulative approach would help agencies address inequities.
Tate is already applying his CEJST experiences to the classroom, incorporating it into a new environmental justice course for spring 2025.
“Our report blends physical scientific knowledge, particularly of health indicators and pollutant exposure, with social science research on marginalization processes and geospatial modeling, and the priorities of community environmental justice activists,” said Tate. “Assessing a major tool for environmental public policy strongly aligns with our work at SPIA and the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment.”