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Last year’s United Nations climate conference in the United Arab Emirates ended on a surprising high note as the world’s countries endorsed a landmark agreement to transition away from fossil fuels. After weeks of tense negotiation, the conference produced a slew of unprecedented commitments to ramp up the deployment of renewables, adapt to climate disasters, and move away from the use of coal, oil, and gas.
The question at this year’s COP29 conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, is just how much that massive effort will cost. After years of global debate over the scale of funding that developed countries owe less fortunate nations for decarbonization and disaster aid, negotiators have until the end of the conference in December to agree on a hard-fought financial target for climate assistance over the next few decades. This new target, referred to as the New Collective Quantified Goal by climate negotiators, is critical to upholding the 2015 Paris Agreement and addressing the harm of fossil fuel emissions from industrialized countries like the United States. Without funding, some of the poorest nations in Asia and Africa, which have contributed negligibly to the climate crisis, stand little chance of transitioning their economies away from fossil fuels and adapting to a warmer world.
The last time the world set such a goal, it didn’t work out well. Back in 2009, wealthy countries agreed to send poorer countries $100 billion in climate finance every year by 2020. Though the figure was less than half of the annual global need, according to World Bank estimates, rich countries didn’t even come close to meeting their target until last year. Even then, some aid organizations like Oxfam contend that these countries have overstated or double-counted their aid by tens of billions of dollars. In the meantime, international estimates of total aid needs have ballooned into the trillions. As a result, the talks around climate finance are still marked by frustration and mistrust, and diplomats debating the goal over the past two years have made little progress toward consensus.
As dozens of negotiators head to Colombia later this month for the first in a series of pre-conference talks that will lay the groundwork for the new goal, developing countries are trying to use the failures of the $100 billion promise as leverage for a much bigger commitment. After years of advocacy from climate-vulnerable nations, the economic heavyweights of India and Saudi Arabia are making a formal demand for climate aid to reach $1 trillion per year, broaching a number that will send negotiations into uncharted territory.
Increasing climate aid by more than tenfold could alter the life prospects of millions of people staring down imminent climate impacts in poor countries in Africa and Asia, but experts say the astronomical number will be a hard sell for many wealthy nations dealing with inflation and domestic turmoil. Plus, the commitment itself won’t mean much without strong safeguards to ensure the money reaches the vulnerable communities that most need it.
“It’s good that countries are using the t-word because that’s grappling with the scale of ambition that we need,” said Joe Thwaites, a climate finance expert at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council. “But the key question is the political one of how you break that up.”
The world has known for years that the $100 billion goal was fundamentally flawed: The target number was far too low to match the mounting toll of climate change in the developing world, which one recent estimate pegged at around $2.4 trillion per year. And more than two-thirds of the aid from wealthy countries has been through loans rather than grants, forcing poor states to take on higher debt loads to respond to climate disasters. Some countries also tried to count aid to seaside hotels and gelato stores as climate assistance, exaggerating their contributions.
The slow pace of United Nations diplomacy has forced developing countries to wait more than a decade for the opportunity to hash out a new number with their counterparts in the United States and the European Union. Now that that chance has arrived, many of these countries are seeking to raise the floor for climate finance by scaling up their demands to a level that once would have sounded ludicrous.
In a letter to fellow negotiators in February, India argued that “developed countries need to provide at least USD 1 trillion per year, composed primarily of grants and concessional finance,” or very low-interest loans. Saudi Arabia, writing on behalf of a group of countries in the Middle East, said just a few days later that “we set a [target] of USD 1.1 trillion from developed to developing countries,” plus arrears for the failure of the last goal. There are just 19 countries in the world whose economies are larger than $1 trillion, according to data from the International Monetary Fund.
The fact that India and Saudi Arabia have endorsed this number is significant. India is the world’s most populous country and one of its largest emitters, and it has significant political clout in climate talks as the largest country that still needs aid to finance its energy transition. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and it has faced immense pressure to join the United States and the European Union in sending aid to poorer countries. They are the only two countries to name a number so far.
Setting such an ambitious goal comes with pros and cons, experts say. On the one hand, shooting for the moon with a very high target provides poor countries with some cushion against the possibility that rich countries may fail to meet their promises. On the other hand, if voters and political leaders in wealthy countries don’t back the goal, the strategy might backfire and poor countries may end up receiving very little aid.
The United States Congress, for instance, has fought for months over whether to send around $60 billion in new aid to Ukraine, and it’s a safe bet that many lawmakers would balk at helping with a trillion-dollar global commitment. Mobilizing climate aid in a divided Congress has proven to be a challenging endeavor in previous years. Endorsing a new goal could even become a liability for President Biden and other climate-forward leaders as they stare down an election year.
Developed countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and those within the European Union haven’t proposed a numerical target for the goal in their missives to fellow negotiators. Instead, they’ve urged a broader conversation about how to mobilize private money and how to ensure aid contributions are reaching the right communities, with Canada for instance advocating a “pragmatic approach to establishing a quantum [goal size].” The U.S. has shied away from discussion of the size, focusing in its letters on questions about which nations should contribute aid money and which nations should receive it.
“Although this [trillion] number better reflects the needs of developing countries, it will be a difficult outcome to achieve given the current constraints of developed countries — shifting geopolitics, energy security concerns, stagflation, and internal politics,” said Aman Srivatstava, a climate finance expert at the Centre for Policy Research, an India-based think tank.
But negotiators and climate advocates told Grist that the structure of the new goal matters just as much as the eventual size. The $100 billion goal was too low, but it was also too vague about what counts as “climate finance,” and many wealthy countries focused on doling out loans and private investment rather than no-strings-attached grants. These countries also tended to provide much more assistance for renewables and energy projects rather than the flood and drought aid that many countries have demanded.
“We don’t need to talk only about the quantum in terms of the money, but also about the quality of the money,” said Sandra Guzmán Luna, the founder of the Climate Finance Group for Latin America and the Caribbean, which helps developing countries in the region track and access climate aid money.
The most likely outcome is a structure that some negotiators liken to an onion with multiple concentric layers. The United States, the European Union, and other wealthy countries would contribute a chunk of public funding in the form of grants for unprofitable projects like sea walls and drinking water systems. The other layers could include additional grants from new contributors like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have ample wealth but have never donated much climate aid, or private loans from investors and banks. This approach would mimic the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a 2022 agreement to protect nature and endangered species that also featured a “layered” set of commitments.
But creating such a complex structure for climate aid ahead of COP29 will be a Herculean task. Despite new endorsements for a $1 trillion goal, rich and poor countries still have huge disagreements about who should contribute to the goal, how much money should come from grants and loans, and how rich countries should be held accountable for their share. Rich countries are advocating a broader group of contributors that would include Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as more flexibility to include private money in their aid contributions. Countries like China and Saudi Arabia, which have huge economies but account for a low share of carbon emissions historically, are pushing for the U.S. and the E.U. to bear the greatest burden.
With COP29 just seven months away, negotiators still haven’t even put their ideas to paper, and drafts of the potential text likely won’t appear until the summer. From there the world’s climate leaders will sprint to settle as many details as possible before the conference clock in Baku runs out. Thwaites likened the process to the puzzle game Rush Hour, where a player has to move several cars around on a grid in order to clear space for one car to escape.
“Even when you think that it’s a done deal, things can fall apart, so it’s hard to make predictions,” said Eleonora Cogo, a climate finance expert at ECCO, an Italian think tank. (Cogo has negotiated on behalf of the European Union in previous climate finance talks.)
Given how far apart the sides are right now, Cogo says that she doubts countries will be able to work out all the details by the end of COP29. The most likely outcome is a basic agreement on “some core elements” like an approximate size and a promise to work the rest out later. This could produce any number of commitments — a strong promise from rich countries to scale up their grants, a weakened framework like the $100 billion goal, or something in between.
“The asks on the table are so different, and the points of departure are so far away,” said Cogo. “It’s all open.”
Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How much do rich countries owe in climate aid? That’s the trillion-dollar question. on Apr 12, 2024.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
Those involved in the Line 5 pipeline controversy have been waiting for the United States Department of Justice — and the Biden administration — to come forward with its opinion on a case that involves tribal sovereignty and foreign relations.
But when the legal brief came down on Wednesday, no one was satisfied.
The Justice Department amicus brief backed claims from a Wisconsin tribe that Enbridge, a Canadian company, was trespassing on its lands by continuing to operate the Line 5 pipeline there. The 71-year-old pipeline carries up to 540,000 barrels of oil and natural gas liquids daily from Superior, Wisconsin, to Sarnia, Ontario.
The DOJ also agreed that Enbridge has been trespassing on the band’s lands for over a decade, and specified the company should pay more than the court-ordered $5.15 million to the band, since the company has made over $1 billion in that time.
“We are grateful the U.S. urged the court not to let Enbridge profit from its unlawful trespass,” said Robert Blanchard, chairman of the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, located in northern Wisconsin.
But, Blanchard added in a statement, they’re disappointed the U.S. didn’t call for the company to stop trespassing immediately: “Enbridge should be required to promptly leave our Reservation, just like other companies that have trespassed on tribal land.”
The legal trail began in 2019, when the band sued Enbridge for trespassing. The district ruling came out last June. Both Enbridge and the band appealed.
In their appeal, Enbridge and the Canadian government pointed to the 1977 Transit Pipeline Treaty between the United States and Canada, which promised an uninterrupted flow of oil and gas products between the nations.
Both Enbridge and Canada argue that shutting down the pipeline before relocating it would violate the pipeline treaty, and would impact energy supplies across the northern U.S. and Canada.
The court waiting for the DOJ brief, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, was looking for guidance on that question.
But the department stopped short of saying how the court should interpret the 1977 treaty, only recommending that the case be sent back to the district court to more fully consider public interests, including diplomatic relations with Canada, energy concerns around Line 5, and protecting the band’s sovereign rights.
“The brief does not provide an interpretation of the transit treaty’s provisions, and that was pretty stunning, given that the court asked specifically for that interpretation,” said the band’s attorney, Riyaz Kanji.
The Bad River Band disagrees with Enbridge and Canada’s interpretation of the pipeline treaty. The band refers to its 1854 treaty with the U.S., which recognizes its sovereign authority over those lands.
Even if the pipeline treaty applies, according to the band, it still allows for pipelines to be regulated, including for pipeline safety and environmental protection.
That has worried the band’s supporters. Some say the U.S. is failing to meaningfully support tribal sovereignty, instead protecting its interests with Canada.
“From the point of view of the tribe and its allies, this is incredibly concerning that the United States is not advocating for the shutdown or removal of that pipeline” said Matthew Fletcher, a citizen of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians and a law professor at the University of Michigan.
Other Great Lakes tribes have argued that accepting Canada and Enbridge’s interpretation of the pipeline treaty would undermine foundational principles of tribal sovereignty and would have major implications for property rights.
In a letter to the Biden administration in late February, representatives from 30 tribal nations across the region said the U.S. should fulfill its trust responsibility by rejecting that interpretation of the pipeline treaty.
Enbridge declined Grist’s request for an interview. In an emailed statement, company spokesperson Ryan Duffy said, “The Government of Canada has made its position clear. Such a shutdown is not in the public interest as it would negatively impact businesses, communities and millions of individuals who depend on Line 5 for energy in both the U.S. and Canada.”
The band, Enbridge, and Canada have until April 24 to respond to the DOJ’s brief. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals will then decide how to move forward.
Editor’s note: Enbridge is an advertiser with Interlochen Public Radio. Advertisers have no role in IPR’s editorial decisions.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline DOJ thinks Enbridge Line 5 pipeline is trespassing on tribal lands on Apr 12, 2024.
Major rivers in Russia and Kazakhstan have risen above their embankments, causing more than 120,000 people to have to flee their homes in the worst flooding in some areas in almost a century.
Residents along the 1,509-mile Ural River, which flows through Russia and Kazakhstan, were forced to evacuate by its fast-rising waters, reported Reuters.
Orenburg, a Russian city of about 550,000, was one of the hardest hit.
“It came very quickly at night,” 71-year-old Taisiya told Reuters in the city about 900 miles southeast of Moscow. “By the time I got ready, I couldn’t get out.”
Entire areas of Orenburg were submerged as snowmelt caused the Ural to swell to a level much higher than what was deemed safe by authorities.
The flooding “might be the biggest disaster in terms of its scale and impact in more than 80 years,” said President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, as CNN reported.
In Orenburg, the local government said the flooding caused the evacuation of more than 7,700 people from almost 13,000 residential buildings.
The city’s water levels rose to approximately 33 feet, the mayor said, higher than the critical level of 30.5 feet.
Flooding in the region looked to be far from over.
“The forecast is unfavorable. The water level continues to rise in flood-affected areas,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Wednesday, according to CNN.
Earlier this week, Orsk, a city downstream from Orenburg, was inundated when a dam embankment burst, reported BBC News.
Springtime flooding is common in Russia, but the scale of the event was rare.
The worst of the flooding hit northern Kazakhstan and the Russian Ural Mountains. Waters also rose in the southern portions of Western Siberia, as well as some areas near Europe’s largest river, the Volga, Reuters reported.
According to Kazakhstan’s ministry of emergency situations, emergency crews had removed 310 million cubic feet of floodwaters.
Emergency workers said the extreme flooding was caused by a combination of waterlogged soils, extensive snowpack, rapidly warming temperatures and heavy rainfall.
Residents of flooded regions have asked the president for assistance, while social media posts showed protestors outside Orsk city hall yelling, “Shame! Shame!” reported CNN.
In other footage, demonstrators criticized the Mayor of Orsk, Vasily Kozupitsa.
“We feed emergency ministry workers with pies and dumplings and bring them thermoses… Kozupitsa cannot even provide for emergency workers. Shame!” said one woman, as CNN reported.
The post Rivers in Russia and Kazakhstan See Worst Flooding in Nearly a Century appeared first on EcoWatch.
The annual Global Energy Monitor (GEM) survey, Boom and Bust Coal, has found that coal-fired operating capacity worldwide rose by two percent last year — the highest annual increase since 2016.
China was responsible for two-thirds of the expansion, with a small amount of growth in other parts of the globe, a press release from GEM said.
“Coal’s fortunes this year are an anomaly, as all signs point to reversing course from this accelerated expansion. But countries that have coal plants to retire need to do so more quickly, and countries that have plans for new coal plants must make sure these are never built. Otherwise we can forget about meeting our goals in the Paris Agreement and reaping the benefits that a swift transition to clean energy will bring,” said Flora Champenois, coal program director for GEM.
According to Global Coal Plant Tracker data, 69.5 gigawatts (GW) of coal capacity were commissioned in 2023, while 21.1 GW were retired — a net yearly increase of 48.4 GW and a total capacity worldwide of 2,130 GW.
Beyond the additions in China, new capacity coming online in India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan, Japan, Bangladesh, South Korea, Zimbabwe and Greece drove the increase.
Outside of China, a total of 22.1 GW were commissioned, with 17.4 GW retired — a net increase of 4.7 GW.
Last year marked the lowest retirement of coal capacity of any year in over a decade.
Since the 2015 Paris Agreement, 25 countries have reduced their coal-fired capacity, while 35 have increased it.
“The world is heading in the right direction in terms of coal’s role in the energy sector, but not quickly enough, and with some risky detours along the way,” said Champenois, as Reuters reported.
Lower coal plant retirements last year in Europe and the United States contributed to the uptick in operating capacity. Nearly half of retirements in 2023 were in the U.S. — 9.7 GW — down from the country’s record high of 21.7 GW in 2015.
European Union countries and the United Kingdom made up about a quarter of retirements, led by the UK, Italy and Poland.
“But the accelerated growth in coal capacity may be short-lived, as low retirement rates in 2023 that contributed to coal’s rise are expected to pick up speed in the U.S. and Europe, offsetting the blip. Heightened capacity additions would also be tempered if China takes immediate action to ensure it meets its target of shutting down 30 gigawatts (GW) of coal capacity by 2025,” GEM said.
In Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and EU nations, coal operating and pre-construction capacity decreased last year to a total of 7.1 GW, the lowest level on record. Just four of these countries — the U.S., Türkiye, Australia and Japan — are still considering new coal projects.
“The global coal landscape has been in transformation for almost a decade, marked by a collapse in the amount of planned coal power plants following the adoption of the Paris Agreement in late 2015. There has been a 68% reduction in global pre-construction capacity since then, and new construction starts are at their lowest outside of China since data collection began,” the press release said.
Since January, 101 countries have either abandoned the last decade’s plans for new coal or have officially committed to the United Nations No New Coal Energy Compact.
“Thankfully, various countries are making clear that shutting coal down is possible, and most of the world is closing in on ‘no new coal.’ Of 82 countries with coal power, 47 have reduced or kept operating capacity flat since the 2015 Paris Agreement,” GEM said. “Austria, Belgium, Sweden, Portugal, Peru, and the United Arab Emirates have retired or converted their last operating coal plants, while Slovakia, the UK, and potentially others are projected to join them in 2024.”
However, coal capacity around the world has actually gone up 11 percent since 2015.
China and India are the two largest coal consumers in the world, together accounting for 82 percent of total pre-construction coal capacity.
Along with China and India, nine other countries — Bangladesh, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Kazakhstan, Russia, Pakistan, Laos, Türkiye and Vietnam — account for 95 percent of coal capacity under consideration, with India accounting for nearly 50 percent outside of China.
“In order to meet the 2015 Paris Agreement goals and put the world on a pathway to no more than 1.5°C of global warming, reducing the use of coal for power generation is the single most important source of emissions reductions,” the press release said. “To align with that goal, modeling by the International Energy Agency and others finds that OECD countries should eliminate coal power by 2030 and the rest of the world by 2040.”
Just 317 GW — 15 percent — of the world’s coal operating capacity has been committed to be retired in accordance with those goals. An additional 210 GW — 10 percent — has a closure commitment in place that must be sped up in order to keep pace with global climate targets.
While most global coal operating capacity is currently under some sort of net zero or similar pledge, 1,626 GW — 75 percent — continues to be without a closure commitment.
“Phasing out operating coal power by 2040 would require an average of 126 GW of retirements per year for the next 17 years, the equivalent of about two coal plants per week. Accounting for coal plants under construction and in pre-construction (578 GW) would require even steeper cuts,” the press release said.
The post Coal Capacity Increased 2% Globally in 2023, the Most Since 2016 appeared first on EcoWatch.
The impacts of climate change on marine life, from rising sea surface temperatures to ocean acidification, have long been studied, but new research is shedding light on the extent of these effects both currently and in the future.
Scientists developed a method that fully considers the consequences of warming oceans and acidification on fish and invertebrate animals, without canceling out certain other impacts, such as when one species begins eating more and another eats less.
“To gain a better understanding of the overall worldwide impact of climate change, marine biologists calculate its effects on all fish or all invertebrate species lumped together,” Katharina Alter, of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) and lead author of the study, explained in a statement. “Yet, effects determined in different individual studies can cancel each other out: for example if invertebrate animals such as snails profit from a certain environmental change and other invertebrates, such as sea urchins, suffer from it, the overall effect for invertebrates is concluded to be zero, although both animal groups are affected.”
Previously, scientists determined three main ways that climate change can affect marine life, including reduced chances of survival, increased metabolism and weakened skeletons of invertebrates. By using the new method to evaluate the effects of climate change on marine life, researchers found negative impacts on behavior, physiology, reproduction and physical development for fish and invertebrates.
According to Alter, these findings, which were published in the journal Nature Communications, showed that the negative consequences on marine life are likely greater than previously thought.
The researchers also estimated how acidification, which happens as increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the air dissolve into the ocean, could continue to impact marine life in the future, both with and without intervention.
“Our new approach suggests that if ocean warming and acidification continue on the current trajectory, up to 100% of the biological processes in fish and invertebrate species will be affected, while previous research methods found changes in only about 20 and 25% of all processes, respectively,” Alter said.
Even in a lower carbon emissions scenario, the researchers determined that acidification will impact about 50% of biological processes in invertebrates and 30% of biological processes in fish, still higher than previous estimates.
In addition to calculating negative impacts of climate change on fish and invertebrates, the researchers considered any potential beneficial outcomes for species for a more comprehensive look at all “hidden impacts” that ocean warming and acidification have on marine life.
“The new calculation method weighs the significant deviation from the current state irrespective of its direction — be it beneficial or detrimental — and counts it as impact of warming and acidifying seawater,” Alter said. “With our new approach, you can include the broadest range of measured responses and detect impacts that were hidden in the traditional approach.”
The study authors noted that more research is needed to determine links between the changes to biological processes, both positive and negative, in marine life and how these could affect ecosystems at large.
The post Climate Change Is Likely Impacting Marine Life More Than Previously Thought, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.
When it comes to a green future, money isn’t everything.
In the case of Indigenous peoples, there also needs to be a variety of support and cultural understanding.
That’s according to Kimberly Yazzie, a Diné researcher in ecology at Stanford University, who has seen how Indigenous communities have been harmed in the race to establish wind, solar and mining projects.
“There’s this history of tribes not getting a fair deal, and so this history needs to be addressed,” she said. “There’s work that needs to be done.”
As lead author in an article published this week in Science, she outlined ways Indigenous peoples can move forward on the journey to save the planet.
Many green projects over the last few years have been criticized for not including tribes in important decisions that infringes or even destroys ancestral land.
Yazzie cautioned that building a just and equitable energy future will take relationship building, research, and consultation. That can take time, she admitted, and while it’s not a luxury many feel we have, it’s essential so mistakes of the past are not repeated.
“To go fast, start slow,” she said.
The three big takeaways from the paper include: flexible application deadlines, equal access to updated and accurate information, and resources to build stronger infrastructure within tribes for projects. Since 2021, federal money has been available for tribal renewable energy projects — an amount that now stands at around $14 billion dollars — and Yazzie hopes that the paper can help tribes access those dollars.
Strict deadlines, for instance,can shut tribes out from funding due to how long it takes to identify resources, secure other funding sources, and tailor competitive applications. The paper calls for rolling deadlines, and specifically mentions the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program as an example of how more applications should accept applications at any time.
A second solution includes increasing access to updated and accurate information for tribal green energy projects. Although the federal government has a database, it can be hard to find state or private information. One solution could be a database updated with funding sources, not only from federal programs but philanthropic organizations, with funding amounts and requirements clearly outlined for easy reference. Or having readily available technical information or experts to answer nuts-and-bolts type questions about solar and electrical projects.
Clara Pratte is a Diné researcher and a tribal government consultant. She’s a co-author on the paper and said that having a more effective way to share information was very important.
“There’s no best practice guide on how to run projects like these,” she said. “And at the end of the day, we want better, more mindful, culturally competent development to happen on tribal lands.”
It’s also important that funding goes to the people on the ground and not just to the project, a way to make sure tribal members are involved. Pratte specifically said the role of “tribal energy champions” can make or break a idea. These are tribal members who stick with a given endeavor through the very early stages till its completion, and can pool information and resources from other tribal energy projects.
Pratte said that ideally this work would be done by tribal members who have cultural knowledge valuable to the ethical development of these projects.
“Just because it’s ‘green’ doesn’t mean it’s going to be done in a thoughtful way, so I think tribes and tribal people really have to be at the forefront of defining what that process looks like,” she said.
Yazzie said she’d also like to take a closer look at the future, especially when the Biden administration’s financial support ends.
“I think a question we’re going to have to ask ourselves is what are we going to do when that administration changes and when funding programs run out,” she said.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline For a just transition to green energy, tribes need more than money on Apr 11, 2024.
Earth Day, coming up on April 22nd, is a global event dedicated to connecting us…
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Staying warm on a budget or just adding a rustic touch to your home is…
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Shortly after being elected president, Joe Biden made a sweeping promise on environmental justice: With a 2021 executive order, he vowed that a full 40 percent of the benefits of certain federal government climate and environmental investments would reach historically disadvantaged communities. This initiative, known as Justice40, was the centerpiece of the administration’s environmental justice efforts and was intended to compensate for both underinvestment and environmental harms that have disproportionately burdened communities of color throughout U.S. history.
Justice40 is striking both for the simplicity and specificity of its objective and also for the big open questions that the goal depends on. For one, Justice40 was conceived before hundreds of billions of dollars in climate funding were unlocked by the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, so it’s unclear what the grand total is from which the 40 percent figure will be drawn. Second, the president promised not 40 percent of spending but 40 percent of the benefits of said spending, and it’s not obvious how the latter is derived from the former. Finally, it’s not entirely clear where exactly the money is intended to go — in other words, for the purposes of Justice40’s accounting, which communities count as “disadvantaged?”
That last question alone was the target of a yearslong, open-source White House project, which resulted in a specialized screening tool for federal agencies to use to identify disadvantaged communities. And the original executive order itself stipulated an accountability mechanism: the creation of a scorecard “detailing agency environmental justice performance measures.” Three years on, however, environmental justice advocates Grist spoke to expressed disappointment in the quality of this progress report, saying the administration’s scorecard is confusing and provides little information about whether or not federal funding is on track to meet Justice40’s lofty goal.
In its current iteration, the scorecard consists of links to multiple web pages detailing the various environmental justice efforts undertaken by each federal agency. Most agencies have reported whether or not they have dedicated environmental justice offices, the number of Justice40-related programs announced, the number of staff dedicated to environmental justice programs, and the amount of funding made available through those programs.
But the information collected provides little insight into how much of that funding has been allocated to disadvantaged communities. Since federal agencies currently don’t have a uniform method of tracking funding down to a specific zip code, that information has not been reported. In some cases, such tracking may not even be possible. For example, when the Department of Transportation builds an electric charging station along a highway, it may be used by residents of multiple communities spread out over a large area. The corresponding air quality improvements, to the extent they can be determined, may also span a vast region. Actually quantifying such benefits — whether it’s improvements in air quality or health or any number of other outcomes — is even more challenging. As a result, an interested member of the public can, for example, look at the EPA’s scorecard and see that the agency has 73 Justice40 programs and that it has made $14 billion in funding available. But how much of that money is going to disadvantaged communities — and the impact of those funds — is unknown.
“The scorecard as it was presented was not user-friendly,” said Maria López-Núñez, an environmental justice advocate with the New Jersey-based Ironbound Community Corporation and co-chair of a White House advisory council’s working group on the scorecard. “It wasn’t really showing the public what the intentions of the scorecard are. When people hear a scorecard, they think, ‘Where’s the grade?’ And we obviously didn’t see any of that.”
“Given the amount of funding that we’re talking about, it seems like a remarkable accountability failure,” added Justin Schott, project manager of the Energy Equity Project at the University of Michigan.
Schott analyzed the information provided by each agency and collated the data in a spreadsheet. He found that there were large discrepancies in the quality of information presented: Some agencies had designated hundreds of staff members to work on environmental justice efforts while others did not report any. To add to the confusion, some agencies reported figures that appear incorrect. For instance, the Department of Agriculture noted that it made 12,000 funding announcements in fiscal year 2022 even though it lists just 65 Justice40 programs. Similarly, the Department of Housing and Urban Development reported conducting an eye-popping 1,914 technical assistance outreach events, though what constitutes such an event is not specified. (A spokesperson for the Housing Department confirmed the number is accurate and noted that outreach events can range from Zoom calls between an agency staffer and a state official to in-person meetings with multiple stakeholders; a spokesperson for the Department of Agriculture also confirmed the accuracy of its count of funding announcements, noting that the department included a broad range of appropriations, including those from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.)
The White House launched the first version of the scorecard, which it described as a “baseline assessment of actions taken by federal agencies in 2021 and 2022,” in early 2023. Since then it has requested recommendations from the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, a body made up primarily of community and environmental justice advocates (including López-Núñez), and solicited feedback from the public. Work on the scorecard is iterative, and the agency is expected to release an updated version later this year.
“The Environmental Justice Scorecard alone cannot fully capture the depth or range of active work or the long-term impact of the Biden-Harris Administration’s environmental justice work within communities, including zero-emission school buses, cleaning up legacy pollution, and strengthening protections for clean water and air,” an administration official wrote in response to Grist’s questions. “As future versions of the Environmental Justice Scorecard are released on an annual basis, we will be continually working to improve the tool based on public input and improving data, so that everyone can better track progress and identify opportunities to advance environmental justice.”
The Biden administration is the first presidency to center environmental justice in its policymaking. Its approach has been broad, requiring every federal agency to consider the equity implications of its actions, including the effects of its policies and the funding that it doles out. Environmental justice advocates Grist spoke to lauded these efforts, which they called unprecedented.
“It’s an undeniable fact that this administration has done more for environmental justice than any of the previous administrations,” said Manuel Salgado, a federal research manager with the nonprofit WE ACT for Environmental Justice and a contributor to a White House advisory council report on the scorecard. “If you look at the numbers that are highlighted on the scorecard, that’s not necessarily reflected.”
Salgado and other members of the advisory council drafted a set of recommendations to improve the scorecard last year. Salgado said that a key impediment is the lack of uniformity in how agencies manage and track the implementation of various programs. Some agencies may be managing hundreds of programs and disbursing billions in funding while others may oversee just a handful. In a number of cases, funding is typically allocated to state agencies, which then make decisions about how and where to invest the funds.
“Every agency operates like their own fiefdom,” said López-Núñez. “They have their own set of entrenched customs and traditions that make it difficult to collaborate with other agencies.”
Those vast differences in how agencies operate led the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which has been coordinating work on the scorecard, to take a “common denominator approach,” according to Yukyan Lam, a research director and senior scientist at The New School’s Tishman Environment & Design Center and an independent contributor to the advisory council’s report on the scorecard. “Trying to bring all the agencies to the lowest common denominator made it more confusing and less clear to the public what the purpose was,” added López-Núñez.
In trying to identify metrics that were relevant to all federal agencies, the White House requested that agencies report environmental justice staffing levels, programs funded, and staff trainings conducted. While that information is useful, it “really failed to capture some of the nuances and specifics of the kinds of work that each individual agency or department was carrying out,” Yam said. When Yam and other members who worked on the report met with agencies, staff were eager to come up with ways to provide specific information relevant to the programs they oversee, she said.
As a result, the advisory council’s report emphasized the need to supplement the standard metrics with granting the agencies flexibility to report customized information most relevant to their work. “Rather than applying uniform expectations for the scorecard to all agencies, we recommend a tailored approach, allowing each agency to provide metrics that are relevant to its activities,” the report noted.
Even with the flexibility to report different metrics, however, tracking the benefits of climate funding will likely prove tricky for agencies. When the EPA provides community grants that increase tree cover in a neighborhood, or the Department of Housing and Urban Development builds more energy-efficient affordable housing, or the Department of Transportation invests in electric charging stations, those investments have environmental and public health benefits. But quantifying those benefits typically involves modeling, which requires expertise and resources. Given the challenges, advocates emphasized the need to at least first track funding.
Salgado said the scorecard is not just an accountability mechanism but also a chance for the administration to communicate its environmental justice work to the public. Most members of the public don’t have an intimate understanding of the inner workings of various federal agencies, and the scorecard could be an opportunity for the Biden administration to explain how environmental justice efforts relate to people’s everyday lives, he said.
“These are big environmental justice wins that should be communicated to the general public, especially in an election year,” said Salgado. “If we want to support our elected officials who provide us with environmental justice benefits, we have to know what they’ve done right. So it’s an opportunity for them to brag and for them to highlight all of these environmental justice wins and the great things that they’ve done over the course of this administration.”
This story has been updated to incorporate comments received from the Department of Agriculture after publication.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden’s environmental justice scorecard offers more questions than answers on Apr 11, 2024.
