Almost four years after newly elected President Joe Biden embraced the cause of environmental justice, an EPA advisory panel is calling for a shakeup in the agency’s tactics for confronting pollution’s entrenched discriminatory impacts.
“A systematic, consistent, and robust engagement process for conducting an EJ analysis is vital if identifying and addressing environmental injustices is the goal,” the Science Advisory Board says in a new report.
EPA should work with communities to foster the “longer-term relationships and trust” needed to address long-standing policies that have spawned those injustices instead of just publishing a Federal Register notice to collect feedback on a draft rule, the report says, for example.
The report, “Advancing Environmental Justice Science in Rulemaking,” similarly urges the creation of “mutually beneficial” partnerships with community representatives. EPA analysts “should be able to explain in plain language the purpose of a proposed rule and what it is intended to address,” the report says, adding that members of the public often can’t access or grasp “the relevance and importance of various data types.”
