WE ACT for Environmental Justice and the Sabin Center Release Model Environmental Justice Bills
In an effort to advance environmental justice solutions across the US, the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, an affiliate of the Columbia Climate School, has partnered with WE ACT for Environmental Justice to launch a set of model state environmental justice bills for legislators and advocates to introduce and adopt of their state’s 2024 legislative sessions.
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Dismantling Injustice: A M.O.D.E.L. (Model for Optimizing and Designing Environmental Laws) For Empowering Communities was created to arm interested legislators with tools to speed up proposed policy changes. It accommodates model legislative language, fact sheets, memos, and regulatory briefing information covering five topic areas: (1) cumulative impact reports, (2) indirect source permits, (3) permit renewals, (4) environmental advisory boards, and (5) zoning.
The model bills include increased regulatory oversight by state environmental agencies to handle environmental injustice, latest data metrics, and increased public engagement—critical components in understanding and mitigating the complete extent of cumulative impacts. WE ACT selected to partner with the Sabin Center within the hopes of leveraging its work on Latest Jersey and Latest York’s cumulative impacts laws to positively impact other communities. This partnership with WE ACT has also furthered the Sabin Center’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism initiative.
The cumulative impacts framework is critical to promoting environmental justice in disadvantaged communities, because the combined exposures to pollutants, in accordance with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “often increases their vulnerability to latest or ongoing environmental hazards, which could cause, perpetuate, or exacerbate disproportionate environmental and public health harms and risks.” Consequently, community members suffer from higher opposed health effects, including asthma, cancer, elevated blood lead levels, respiratory and heart problems, and development disorders.
Environmental justice topics—and specifically cumulative impacts—have been the topic of renewed interest under the Biden Administration, which issued an Executive Order in 2021 memorializing the goal that 40 percent of the general advantages of certain federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities which are marginalized, underserved, and overburdened by pollution.
The discharge of those model laws is especially timely in light of recently weakened or repealed federal environmental protections, which has led to uncertainty regarding the evaluation, guidance, and regulatory enforcement related to the assessment of cumulative impacts.
While some states, equivalent to Latest York, Latest Jersey, and Maryland, have already enacted cumulative impacts and environmental justice laws, additional efforts on the state level are needed to proceed addressing cumulative impacts.
Andrea Nishi is the Climate Justice Fellow on the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.
This post was originally published by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. The complete suite will be found at DismantlingInjustice.org.
