Building Public Tools to Advance Environmental Justice (US0120)

Many communities across the country—and especially those that are disadvantaged, marginalized, and underserved communities—face environmental risks, including exposure to pollution and toxic waste, lack of access to clean drinking water, and insufficient protec- 7 tion from storms and floods, among other harms. The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to ensuring that all Americans live in healthy, thriving communities and is acting on that commitment in several important environmental justice initiatives.

Executive Order 14008 on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad launched the first-ever White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council (WHEJAC) to provide recommendations on how to address current and historic environmental injustice as well as to advance environmental justice, including in the area of climate change mitigation, resilience, and disaster management. Initial recommendations from the WHEJAC will inform the design of a new public Environmental Justice Scorecard, which will track the environmental justice advances across the Administration. The scorecard will be produced by the Office of Management and Budget, the Council on Environmental Quality, and the U.S. Digital Service, and informed by public input from a Request for Informa- tion published in August 2022. The Federal Government commits to implementing this scorecard as a tool for the public to help hold Federal programs accountable for equitable environmental justice investments. The public scorecard will complement the recently-released public Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, called for in E.O. 14008, which will help Federal agencies identify disadvantaged communities for the Justice40 Initiative, which seeks to direct 40% of the overall benefits of investments in climate and related areas to disadvantaged communities. It also helps members of the public visualize environmental and economic disadvantage present in their communities.

Action Plan Review

Commitment 8: Data for environmental justice
Implementing agencies: Office of Management and Budget, Council on Environmental Quality, U.S. Digital Service.

For a complete description of the commitment, see pages 6–7 in the U.S. 2022–2024 action plan: https://www.opengovpartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/United-States_Action-Plan_2022-2024_December.pdf.

Context and objectives
This commitment builds on more than a decade of work in introducing environmental risk screening tools. These allow law enforcement officers and scientists to carry out inspections and enforcement in areas where communities are at high risk—including pre-existing vulnerabilities as well as high exposure and hazard.

The commitment is backed by Executive Order 14008 on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad, signed on 27 January 2021. [6] Its main goal is to produce a performance scorecard to be implemented in agencies across the administration and be made available to the public so it can monitor the progress being made in tackling environmental issues and keep the government accountable for it. The new tool is meant to supplement the recently released Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, [7] aimed at helping federal agencies identify disadvantaged communities for the Justice40 Initiative, that is, as recipients of 40% of the overall benefits of investments in climate and related areas.

The commitment has a strong transparency focus, but also contains components of civic participation and accountability.

Potential for results: Substantial
The commitment seeks to build an Environmental Justice Scorecard to track advances in environmental justice across the administration. This scorecard is meant to be the first government-wide assessment of federal agencies’ efforts to advance environmental justice. It is viewed as a tool that will evolve over time, building up a robust and comprehensive assessment of the government's efforts in this policy area. As explained in an August 2022 request for information, it will eventually be located on a public, web-based, user-friendly platform. [8]

This commitment is framed as a long-time effort. The first version of the scorecard will provide a baseline assessment with data collected starting in 2021 and will then be built upon over subsequent years. Initially, it will focus on three main activities: those aimed at reducing harms and burdens borne disproportionately by communities, those focused on delivering investment benefits, and those undertaking institutional reform to center community voices in decision making. It will also measure progress made towards the Justice40 Initiative, aimed at ensuring that 40% of the overall benefits of certain federal investments—those made in climate, clean energy and energy efficiency, clean transit, affordable and sustainable housing, training and workforce development, the remediation and reduction of legacy pollution, and the development of critical clean water infrastructure—go to disadvantaged, marginalized, and overburdened communities.

The commitment has potential to yield substantial results even considering that major connected activities—such as a request for information to feed into its design, carried out between August and October 2022—were completed before the start of the action plan implementation period. The Phase One Scorecard had also been fully or nearly completed for 24 agencies, including data reflecting progress made in 2021 and 2022, at the beginning of the implementation period. [9]

Although it has some metrics, the Phase One Scorecard is not a scorecard yet—it reads more like a repository of information or a summary report for each agency rather than a scorecard allowing users to pull out, compare, and visualize data to track progress. There is a lot to be done to turn this into a user-friendly tool, integrate it with the existing screening tool, and promote their use by communities and civil society organizations.

Opportunities, challenges, and recommendations during implementation
For the commitment to yield substantial results, efforts should now focus on turning the Environmental Justice Scorecard platform, already populated with valuable information, into an actual scorecard with interactive features making it useful for communities and civil society, while continuing to update it with new information produced during the two-year action plan cycle. Such accessible data would be useful for stakeholders to advance legal strategies such as class action and strategic litigation cases.

To ensure the platform evolves into a data tool that is genuinely useful, target users should be included in the next stages of the process. It will be key to understand not just what data that communities and organizations are most interested in and what they are going to use it for, but also to identify the web functionalities they would need to get the most out of the available information. To make it a proper monitoring and accountability tool, it is also advisable to include interactive features allowing users to provide feedback and request responses from the agencies in question.

It is also key for the scorecard to be not just usable but also actually used. To ensure this, serious efforts should be made to disseminate the new tools and promote their use. Including civil society stakeholders from the get-go will facilitate this by producing more ownership among potential users.