CalEnviroScreen: A Critical Tool for Achieving Environmental Justice
In California, low-income residents, people of color, immigrants and indigenous communities often experience more environmental pollution and related health burdens than others. Using the CalEnviroScreen’s cumulative impact analysis of pollution burdens and socioeconomic vulnerabilities, decision-makers can craft and implement policies that can improve the overall health and quality of life in these neighborhoods.
In our new report, CalEnviroScreen: A Critical Tool for Achieving Environmental Justice, we discuss the importance of CalEnviroScreen 3.0: its purpose, the history of its development, and how it works to advance environmental justice at both the state and local levels.
The report also clarifies common misunderstandings about CalEnviroScreen, and how it should be used to not only direct important investments, but also to create environmental protections for areas most overburdened by pollution. This has helped drive a more comprehensive approach to addressing the full range of environmental and socioeconomic burdens that environmental justice communities face.
The most recent version CalEnviroScreen 3.0 provides California with one clear, accessible and science-based methodology for identifying environmental justice communities. It continues to reshape what is possible in state and local policymaking. Through this report, we hope to shed more light on how the tool should be used to allocate important protections and improvements for our state’s most overburdened communities.
