Environmental justice advocates generally embraced the tool’s release, though they expressed the broad expectation that the administration needs to refine the mapping effort in future iterations.“There is more work to do, but this is a positive step in the administration’s work to advance environmental justice for all,” said Richard Moore, co-coordinator of the Los Jardines Institute in Albuquerque, N.M., and a co-chair of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. The CEQ screening tool—which draws from other environmental equity mapping efforts long in use by the EPA and states such as California, Michigan, Maryland, and New Mexico—are key to President Joe Biden’s Justice40 effort to steer 40% of the benefits of climate, clean energy, affordable housing, and other investments to disadvantaged communities.

The CEQ today announced that Version 1.0 of the CEJST includes nine new datasets that expand its criteria for disadvantage, and now capture projected climate risk, lack of indoor plumbing, linguistic isolation, redlining data, legacy pollution, and water pollution. These added indicators help the tool better identify farmworker communities, who often experience unsafe housing conditions, and communities who experience environmental injustices due to the legacy of racist public policy. The CEJST also identifies lands that are within the boundaries of Federally Recognized Tribes and locations of Alaska Native Villages as disadvantaged communities. These improvements to the CEJST directly incorporate several of our recommendations, and reassure us that the CEQ is laying out a more transparent, iterative and democratic process for identifying communities eligible for Justice40 benefits.

Today, 50 organizations sent a public letter to the House Agriculture Committee and the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, calling for a transformative 2023 Farm Bill. They urged the legislators to incentivize reductions in pesticide use, include provisions to protect farmworker health, and increase funding and research for organic and regenerative farming, representing fenceline communities, food system workers and farmworkers, family farmers, businesses, scientists, and environmental health and justice organizations.The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that global agriculture contributes 34% of the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change, but the Farm Bill has not explicitly addressed climate change since 1990. An estimated 1 billion pounds of pesticides, manufactured from fossil fuel feedstocks, are used on United States farms each year. The next Farm Bill could decrease agricultural carbon emissions by incentivizing farmers to reduce reliance on pesticides, in favor of regenerative, climate-resilient practices such as certified organic farming, the letter states.

The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) is being roundly urged to set clearer metrics and be more transparent in the scorecard it is developing to track EPA and other agencies’ progress implementing the Biden administration’s Justice40 initiative, with dozens of groups submitting comments in response to CEQ’s August request for information (RFI).

“For the Scorecard to be transparent and meaningful, CEQ must clearly define the primary metrics by which success will be measured,” and these should include “reductions in pollution and improvement in health and quality of life,” Coming Clean and the Environmental Justice Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform say in joint Nov. 3 comments.

On Monday, October 31st, 2022, 86 organizations, including Coming Clean and the Environmental Justice Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform (EJHA) submitted a joint public comment to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on proposed revisions to its Risk Management Program (RMP) rule. The EPA intends these revisions to “make communities safer by reducing the frequency of chemical releases and their adverse effects.” But in their comment letter, the organizations stress that the proposed rule is too weak to prevent future chemical disasters. “Fenceline communities, facility workers, and a wide variety of experts have demonstrated conclusively to EPA that voluntary measures are not working to prevent chemical incidents,” states the letter. “There is abundant evidence available to EPA of policies and methods proven to reduce and remove hazards. EPA needs to finally deliver the basic and common-sense protections that communities, workers, and safety experts have been seeking for too long.”