Remake, a U.S.-based nonprofit, has released its annual Fashion Accountability Report for 2024, with brands including Temu, Fashion Nova, Missguided and Skims scoring zero points out of a possible 150 for factors like transparency and environmental justice.
The nonprofit’s Fashion Accountability Report scores companies for their progress on various criteria, including transparency, wages and wellbeing for workers, raw materials, environmental justice efforts, commercial practices and governance. In total, a company can score 150 points for progress toward these markers. The report assessed 52 companies on their social and environmental actions.
Four companies fell to the bottom of the rankings this year with zero points: Fashion Nova, Missguided, Skims and Temu. Fast fashion giant Shein, which was recently called out in a bill proposal in France that would enact penalties on fast fashion companies, scored slightly higher than these four companies with six total points. Other companies with fewer than 10 points include Columbia Sportswear Co., Macy’s, Amazon, Abercrombie & Fitch Co., Chanel and Rothy’s, among others.
The highest scoring brand was Everlane, with 40 out of 150 points, followed by H&M Group with 37, PUMA with 36, Reformation with 34 and Ralph Lauren with 30.
The report highlighted that about half of the companies, 28, have set Supplier Codes of Conduct to assess how factories comply with international labor, health and safety and environmental standards. But none of the companies assessed showed purchasing practices that make sure suppliers provide fair wages and are environmentally sustainable, the report noted.
Another part of the report compared how much money some companies were spending on garment workers wages per year compared to CEO salaries. According to the report, Asia Floor Wage Alliance has estimated the monthly living wage for garment workers in Bangladesh to be around BDT 53,104 (about $484), although the current minimum wage is short, BDT 40,604 (about $370) a month or about BDT 487,248 (about $4,440), annually.
The report authors wrote, “To put it into perspective, it roughly equals:
0.02% of the Walmart CEO’s annual compensation of $24.1 million
0.03% of the Target CEO’s annual compensation of $17.6 million
0.03% of the VF Corporation CEO’s annual compensation of $15.4 million
0.1% – 0.04% of the H&M Group CEO’s annual compensation of between $5 – $12 million
0.06% of the Inditex CEO’s annual compensation of $7.4 million
0.07% of the Marks and Spencer co-CEOs’ annual compensation of $6.1 million
0.1% of the NEXT CEO’s annual compensation of $3.2 million
0.6% of the C&A CEO’s annual compensation of $700,000
0.8% of the New Look CEO’s annual compensation of $524,000.”
The gap could be even wider, as Reuters reported in November 2023 that following worker protests, Bangladesh was raising the minimum wage for garment workers to 12,500 BDT (about $114) per month, or around 150,000 BDT (about $1,367) per year.
On the environmental front, the accountability report found that most of the companies, 37 of them, shared their total annual carbon emissions across their value chain, and 30 of the companies in the assessment have short-term emissions reduction goals to meet the 1.5°C target. Burberry, Everlane, H&M Group and Patagonia have additionally set long-term emissions reduction targets.
Further, 13 of the companies utilized in-site resale programs for their preowned garments, and 15 of the companies assessed offered repair or upcycling programs. But zero companies offered transparency about what happens with collected items taken for upcycling or other take-back initiatives, according to the report.
“What the fashion industry needs is a significant investment in decarbonization that is tailored to the unique needs of each country and each factory,” the authors wrote. “For a true partnership between fashion companies and suppliers, workers should be at the table helping to guide the co-creation of strategies to reduce emissions. Workers are crucial partners in the clean energy transition and need to be supported through and insulated from the effects of climate change.”
Last month, Democratic New York City Council Member James Gennaro introduced a bill that would change the way countless New Yorkers do their laundry — by banning laundry detergent pods.
More specifically, the bill — dubbed “Pods Are Plastic” — proposed a ban on dishwashing and laundry detergent pods coated in polyvinyl alcohol, or PVA, a type of plastic that disintegrates when submerged in water. Laundry and soap companies have long argued that the PVA coating is totally safe and 100 percent biodegradable, but proponents of the bill say that neither of those claims is true.
“Products and profit should not come at the expense of the environment,” Sarah Paiji Yoo, co-founder of a plastic-free cleaning product company called Blueland, said in a statement. Blueland, which manufactures PVA-free laundry and dishwasher tablets, helped write the bill and has been a vocal critic of PVA for years. In 2022, the company helped pen a petition asking the EPA to remove PVA from a list of chemicals it has deemed safe to use. (The EPA rejected the request last year.)
The Pods Are Plastic bill faces uncertain prospects in the New York City Council. If it does pass, however, it will only go a short way toward mitigating laundry-related microplastic pollution. Research suggests that billions of plastic microfibers shear off of our clothing every day — when we wear them, when we wash and dry them. And even more microplastics are released upstream, when clothes are manufactured.
“It’s a multi-faceted issue,” said Judith Weis, a professor emeritus of biological sciences at Rutgers University. To solve it, environmental advocates are calling for more systemic solutions — not just a ban on PVA, but new laws requiring washing machine filters, better clothing design, and a shift away from fast fashion.
Long before consumers crack open a container of Tide Pods, their laundry has already begun generating microplastic pollution. That’s because some 60 percent of clothing today is made with plastic. Polyester, nylon, acrylic, spandex — they’re all just different types of fossil fuel-derived plastic fabric. And more plastic clothing could be on the horizon, as fossil fuel companies pivot to plastic production in response to the world’s transition away from using fossil fuels for electricity generation and transportation.
Mostmediaattention has focused on microplastics that slough off of clothing in the wash. And for good reason: According to a 2019 study in the journal Nature, washing machines can generate up to 1.5 million plastic microfibers per kilogram of washed fabric. Too small to get caught in standard washing machine filters, some 200,000 to 500,000 metric tons of these microfibers slip out into wastewater every year and eventually make their way into the marine environment. That’s about a third of all microplastics that directly enter the world’s oceans.
Tide Pod containers on a grocery store shelf.
Alex Tai / Sopa Images / LightRocket via Getty Images
Ocean microplastics are linked to a range of deleterious health effects in marine animals, including inhibited development, reproductive issues, genetic damage, and inflammation. Weis said these observations are alarming for their own sake — “I’m concerned about the marine animals themselves,” she told Grist — but they could also have implications for the health of humans, who might eat microplastics-contaminated seafood. Researchers have found microplastics throughout people’s bodies — in their brains, bloodstreams, kidneys, and, most recently, in 62 of 62 placentas tested — and it’s not yet clear what the impacts could be.
But, as Grist reported last year, there are still many other ways that microplastics escape from our clothing. Just wearing plastic clothes, for instance, causes abrasion and the subsequent release of microplastics into the air. Some researchers think this actually causes more microplastic pollution than doing laundry; they estimate that a single person’s normal clothing use could release more than 900 million microfibers per year, compared to just 300 million from washing.
And then there’s the manufacturing stage, which is perhaps the least understood source of plastic microfiber pollution. Every part of the clothes-making process can release microplastics, from the initial polymerization of natural gas and oil to the actual weaving, knitting, and subsequent processes that turn fabric into garments. According to a 2021 white paper from the nonprofit The Nature Conservancy and the consulting firm Bain and Company, abrasion from dyeing, printing, and pre-washing clothes releases billions of plastic microfiber particles into factory wastewater every day — and not all of these particles are destroyed or filtered out by wastewater treatment.
The white paper estimates that pre-consumer textile manufacturing releases about 120,000 metric tons of microplastics into the environment annually — less than laundry or wearing clothing, but the same order of magnitude.
At the opposite end of the textile life cycle are even more opportunities for synthetic clothes to shed microplastics. Disposed textiles that are incinerated can release microfibers — and hazardous chemicals — into the air, while those that are littered or sent to a landfill can release them into the soil. There is some evidence to suggest that earthworms and other organisms can transport these microplastics into deeper layers of soil, where they are more likely to contaminate groundwater.
“While it’s absolutely important to make sure we’re addressing loss that occurs during the wearing and washing phase, … it’s even more important to make sure we’re addressing microfiber pollution across the full life cycle,” said Alexis Jackson, associate director of The Nature Conservancy’s California oceans program.
A woman loads clothes into a front-loading washing machine.
In Pictures Ltd. / Corbis via Getty Images
Unlike other sources of microplastic pollution, detergent pods are intentionally added to laundry. They date back to the early 2010s, when Procter and Gamble introduced its now-infamous PVA-coated Tide Pods — described at the time as the firm’s biggest laundry innovation in a quarter of a century. The PVA design, which reportedly took eight years to come up with, really was a breakthrough: It separated cleansers, brighteners, and fabric softeners into discrete chambers so they wouldn’t mix before entering the wash cycle. And, unlike previous designs, PVA film could dissolve in either hot or cold water.
Over the past nine years, laundry detergent pods’ market value in the U.S. has grown by 36 percent to $3.25 billion; it’s projected to exceed $3.5 billion by 2025.
To protect that growth, laundry industry trade groups have assured consumers that pods’ PVA plastic coating will biodegrade and not harm people or ecosystems. The American Cleaning Institute, which represents U.S. cleaning product companies including Procter and Gamble, SC Johnson, and Unilever, contends that, “[w]hen exposed to moisture and microorganisms, PVA breaks down into nontoxic components, making it a more sustainable alternative to traditional plastics.”
But some experts disagree. Notably, a 2021 literature review conducted by researchers at Arizona State University — and commissioned by Blueland — found that less than a quarter of the PVA that reaches wastewater treatment plants actually degrades; 77 percent, about 8,000 metric tons per year, is released into the environment intact. That’s not because PVA can’t be degraded by microorganisms; it’s just that the right microorganisms are often not present in wastewater treatment plants, or the PVA doesn’t stay at the plants long enough to actually break down. According to research sponsored by cleaning product industry groups, it can take 28 days for at least 60 percent of PVA to break down and 60 days for 90 percent of it to degrade.
There isn’t “a single wastewater treatment plant in the United States where water sits with those microbes for anything close to 28 days,” Charles Rolsky, a coauthor of the Blueland-funded study who now works as a senior research scientist at the Shaw Institute in Maine, told The Washington Post in 2022. “At most, it might be a week, but more realistically it’s days to hours.”
In response to Grist’s request for comment, the American Cleaning Institute decried “the misinformation campaign being waged by Blueland” and said the New York City bill to ban PVA was “unnecessary.” A spokesperson for the trade group directed Grist to previously published statements and an online chart saying that the kind of PVA used in laundry detergent pods is of a higher quality than the PVA analyzed by the Blueland-funded study, and that laundry pod PVA “dissolves completely and biodegrades within hours of wastewater treatment.”
Procter and Gamble referred Grist to the American Cleaning Institute’s communications team.
Shoppers walk past Zara, a fast fashion outlet with locations around the world.
Budrul Chukrut / Sopa Images / LightRocket via Getty Images
Getting a hold on the clothing microplastics problem will require a range of solutions. Right now, most of the focus is on washing machine filters that conscientious consumers can install in their homes. The best filters available today can theoretically trap upwards of80 percent of laundry microplastics. Filter-adjacent technologies — like the Cora Ball or Guppyfriend bag that can be placed in washing machines along with laundry — may also help.
A small number of states have consideredlaws to make filters mandatory for appliance manufacturers, or to incentivize the purchase of filters through consumer rebates. Some companies — like Samsung — are trying to get ahead of potential regulation by devising their own filter technologies that can be attached to standard machines; others are designing washing machines with built-in microplastics filters.
Meanwhile, scientists are trying to design clothes that won’t shed so many microfibers in the first place. Yarns with more twists and woven structures, for example, tend to release fewer microfibers, as do fabrics cut with heat and lasers (as opposed to scissors).
“I’m optimistic that science can solve this problem,” said Juan Hinestroza, a professor of fiber science and apparel design at Cornell University. With adequate research funding, he thinks it’ll be possible — within less than a generation — to design synthetic clothing that sheds virtually no microplastics.
Perhaps the most holistic solution, however, would be to regulate and limit the use of plastics for clothing and laundry applications altogether. The fast fashion industry in particular is a big contributor to the microplastics problem, if only because of the sheer quantity of synthetic clothing it produces. Weis said it’s time to hold major apparel companies accountable for their products’ release of microplastics, potentially through extended producer responsibility laws that make companies financially responsible for the trash and pollution they create. New York state is currently considering such a law, although it mostly relates to packaging, not clothes or microplastics. Weis also called for general plastic restrictions as part of the global plastics treaty currently being negotiated by the United Nations.
Yoo supports similar solutions. In the meantime, though, she’s continuing to push for the New York City bill banning PVA. “This bill is about so much more than just pods,” she said. “I get it when people are like, ‘This is not the biggest problem,’ … but I think this can be a really important starting point. It sends an important signal to businesses that plastic products should not be designed to go down our drains and into our water.”
The scientist Paul Crutzen grew tired of the Holocene 24 years ago. The geologic epoch had reigned for 11,700 years, ever since the sprawling ice sheets covering North America and Europe began melting rapidly, and Crutzen thought its time was up. The atmospheric chemist had won a Nobel Prize in 1995 for demonstrating how humanity was destroying the ozone layer, just one of the many ways people had radically altered the planet, from urbanization to releasing greenhouse gases. After repeatedly hearing mention of the Holocene at a scientific conference in Mexico, Crutzen lost his temper.
Interrupting a speaker, he announced that the world had already entered a new age: the Anthropocene. The notion, which a few people had pondered as early as the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, implied that human activity was a powerful geological force, one rivaling volcanoes and asteroids. “My remark had a major impact on the audience,” Crutzen, who died in 2021, recalled years later. “First there was a silence, then people started to discuss this.”
All these years later, they’re still discussing it. Since Crutzen’s outburst, the term “Anthropocene” has proliferated through the sciences, humanities, and pop culture. (The musician Grimes named one of her albums Miss Anthropocene.) The task of formalizing the geological era fell to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the scientific organization which establishes global standards for such things. The Earth system scientists who became part of the commission’s Anthropocene Working Group, created in 2009, found themselves at the center of a contentious debate as the world looked to them for a definitive answer: Are we living in the Anthropocene?
As differences came to a head, heated discussions, votes, and resignations ensued. The latest drama came last week, when The New York Times reported that a committee of scholars had rejected the working group’s proposal to declare the Anthropocene an official epoch after 15 years of debate. Some panelists disputed the report of the leaked vote. A press release shared by the committee’s chair said the alleged vote violated the group’s rules and that an inquiry into annulling it was being launched.
Epochs are typically stretches of several million years designated by clues left in the soil, rocks, and fossils. Even as some headlines suggested that the decision meant Earth hasn’t entered the “age of humans,” geologists and other experts say the vote shouldn’t change how people talk about humanity’s influence on the planet. Since the Industrial Revolution, climate change has warmed the globe by 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.2 degrees Celsius) and counting. The Anthropocene might still be considered a geological “event,” a more flexible term that would put it on par with major transformations such as the Great Oxidation Event, when oxygen became a major component of Earth’s atmosphere more than 2 billion years ago.
“Nobody is saying that global change caused by people is not significant,” said Erle C. Ellis, an environmental scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a former member of the working group. “It’s just about whether we should narrow down the Anthropocene definition to an epoch beginning in 1952.”
The trouble with pinning down a date stems from the fact that humans have been changing the planet for a long time. The comparatively calm, warm conditions of the Holocene encouraged the development of agriculture. People planted crops and built cities, expanding civilization until they started remaking Earth itself. Somewhere in the midst of all this activity — the clearing of the world’s forests, the rampant burning of fossil fuels, and the testing of nuclear bombs — scientists say the planet entered the Anthropocene.
Last year, the working group settled on 1952 after identifying Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada, as the best place to find proof of this new age. Almost 80 feet under the glassy surface, the layers of mud at the bottom almost perfectly preserve hints of human history, such as maize pollen from nearby Indigenous settlements of the 13th century and charcoal from a local logging mill in the 19th. A layer of radioactive plutonium from mid-century nuclear weapon testing was selected as a potential “golden spike,” a term for unique geological signatures that typically mark the start of new epochs.
A scientist examines a Crawford Lake core sample at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. The sample is considered a potential marker for the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch. Lance McMillan / Toronto Star via Getty Images
The group found “overwhelming evidence that there was a fundamental change in how the planet works around that time,” said Francine McCarthy, an Earth scientist at Brock University in Ontario, who led a team of 60 researchers collecting and examining soil samples at Crawford Lake. For McCarthy, the controversial vote is a frustrating end to many years of work. “I don’t care what other people feel should be the beginning of the Anthropocene,” she said. “We spent 15 years, millions of euros to answer the question.”
The awareness that humans might be irrevocably changing their home dates to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when steam engines started chugging and industrial factories emerged. George Perkins Marsh, an early American conservationist, declared that humans were reshaping Earth — for the worse — in his influential 1864 book Man and Nature. In 1873, Antonio Stoppani, an Italian priest and geologist, proclaimed that the “Anthropozoic era” had begun, with no end in sight.
Scholars started reckoning with the concept in earnest after World War II, when radiocarbon from nuclear bomb blasts settled into the rock record. In 1955, 70 researchers from around the world met in Princeton, New Jersey, for a symposium on “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth” for the first large-scale discussion of how humans had transformed the environment. But it wasn’t until 2000 that the idea really took off. Crutzen, along with the diatom researcher Eugene F. Stoermer, wrote a newsletter proposing the term “Anthropocene” for the current geological epoch.
For Dipesh Chakrabarty, a historian at the University of Chicago, hearing the term for the first time was career-changing. Branching out from his work on South Asian history, he began to write about climate change, eventually publishing a handful of books on the subject. “I was very struck that geologists were describing humanity as a geological force,” he said. “That is something much bigger than what I used to imagine humans to be.”
Not all scholars love the term, though. Some argue that it generalizes the culpability for climate change and other environmental problems, seemingly blaming everyone instead of the countries and industries most responsible. The discussion has spawned a host of bizarre-sounding spin-offs: the Capitalocene (blaming capitalism), the Plantationocene (blaming agriculture), and the Occidentalocene (blaming rich, industrialized countries).
Ellis used to think that formalizing the Anthropocene as an epoch was a good idea, but last summer, after 14 years of heated discussion — and a dispute over narrowing the start date to 1950 — he resigned from the Anthropocene Working Group. Now, he thinks that restricting the term to a technical definition may only confuse the public. The quest to establish the Anthropocene as an epoch was “an experiment in how to communicate the science of humans changing the planet,” Ellis said. “And it is a failed experiment.”
“We can still use the term as we always have,” he said, in the wake of the commission’s vote. “We just don’t need an epoch to attach to it.”
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy.
Many Panhandle residents whose dwellings and possessions burned in the region’s ongoing wildfires may never financially recover for one simple reason: Their homes weren’t insured.
“A lot of the people who have lost a home had no insurance,” Governor Greg Abbott said at a March 1 press conference. “So there are a lot of people in great need right now.”
Texans pay some of the highest homeowners insurance premiums in the country. Increased risk of extreme weather events, at least partially driven by climate change, have driven up those costs. Growth in homeowners insurance rates here outpaced the rest of the nation last year, straining Texans’ ability to pay.
In Texas, those without insurance are also more likely to be those who have a harder time recovering from disaster: lower-income households and rural residents. That means Texans without insurance face a steep — if not impossible — path to restore what financial well-being they had before a disaster strikes.
Patricia Hester, a 76-year-old Fritch resident, is among several Panhandle residents whose home was destroyed by a wildfire that swept through her neighborhood on the town’s south side on February 27. She dropped her homeowners insurance on her manufactured home about a decade ago because of rising costs.
“When you’re on a limited income, something has to give,” Hester said. “You have to eat and be able to get gas in the car. So that’s what I gave.”
It’s common for families, particularly those that are low-income, in areas destroyed by the Panhandle fires to not have homeowners insurance, local officials and community leaders said. Many simply can’t afford it and, because they own their homes outright, nothing requires them to carry it, they said.
Julie Winters, the executive director for Hutchinson County United Way, said about 70 families in Fritch whose homes had been damaged or destroyed asked the organization for assistance on March 1. Most of them didn’t have homeowners insurance, she said.
“This is a lower socioeconomic level of the community that got hit,” Winters said. “They probably cannot afford insurance.”
Texas homeowners who go without insurance tend to be lower-income, according to an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data conducted by the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University. Homeowners in the state’s rural areas are more likely to not have insurance than their urban counterparts, the analysis found. Some 11 percent of homeowners in the state’s major metropolitan areas don’t have homeowners insurance, whereas about 26 percent of homeowners in rural areas lack it.
Further complicating matters: Several homes that burned down were manufactured homes, which homeowners can struggle to get insured. That’s because insurers consider them more risky investments since they are highly vulnerable to fires and other natural disasters, said Thomas Chandler, deputy director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University.
And homeowners insurance is considered the most clear-cut avenue to seek financial restitution after a major disaster, experts told the Tribune. Going without it means homeowners would have to pay for repairs and rebuilding out of pocket — or rely on assistance from the public and private sectors that may not come.
Officials haven’t determined the full scope of the disaster as the fires continue to rage, though it’s believed hundreds of homes have been damaged or destroyed. The ultimate scale of the damage will determine whether displaced residents and others affected by the wildfires qualify for federal disaster aid under an emergency declaration.
Abbott said on March 1 he is waiting on a full assessment of the damages before requesting a declaration from the federal government.
Even if the assistance that can come with a federal disaster declaration arrives, it likely won’t fully replace what many homeowners in the Panhandle lost, Chandler said.
“It’s really more ‘get back on your feet’ money designed to enable you to just get started again,” Chandler said.
Stacy McFall, a 52-year-old certified nursing assistant who lives in Fritch, said she tried to obtain insurance to cover her childhood home, which she moved into about 14 years ago. But the home didn’t sit on a foundation, she said, so no insurer would write her a policy.
Flames engulfed McFall’s home on February 27. She had just enough time to pack her three dogs and a stack of clothes into her car before she evacuated, she said. McFall’s sister has taken her in for now, but McFall isn’t sure yet how she’ll bounce back.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” McFall said. “You feel kind of numb. You don’t know if you’re going to find a home. Everything is burnt to a crisp and I have to start all over again with everything.”
McFall’s son and daughter, who live in Dallas and Austin, respectively, have asked her to come live with them, she said, but she doesn’t want to move.
“This is my home,” McFall said.
Disclosure: Texas A&M University has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
This story was originally published by CalMatters.
The system that California uses to screen neighborhoods at risk of environmental harm is highly subjective and flawed, resulting in communities potentially missing out on billions of dollars in funding, according to new research.
The study, by researchers who began the project at Stanford University, investigated a tool that the California Environmental Protection Agency developed in 2013 as the nation’s “first comprehensive statewide environmental health screening tool” to identify communities disproportionately burdened by pollution.
Communities that are designated “disadvantaged” by the system, called CalEnviroScreen, can qualify for significant government and private funding. The tool has been used to designate vast swaths of the Central Valley, communities around the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, and neighborhoods in the Bay Area cities of Richmond and Oakland, among others.
The researchers found that the screening tool uses a small number of health problems that could bias which communities are designated.About 16 percent of Census tracts in the state could be ranked differently with alterations in EnviroScreen’s model, according to the study.
The system raises equity issues because it biases in favor of certain groups over others, and has the potential of pitting groups against each other for funding in what is essentially a winner-take-all, or loser-take-all, system, according to the research.
For instance, “we found the existing model to potentially underrepresent foreign-born populations,” the researchers wrote.
The Chevron refinery in Richmond.
Loren Elliott for CalMatters
Community groups and environmental justice advocates have said for years that the tool overlooks communities that should be designated as disadvantaged.
At stake is a large amount of funding — about $2.08 billion over just a recent, four-year period, the researchers reported.
“The big takeaway is that if you asked ten different experts in California to come up with their own screening algorithm to determine which neighborhoods are ‘disadvantaged,’ you would probably get 10 very different algorithms,” said lead author Benjamin Huynh, who was a doctoral student at Stanford and is now a researcher at Johns Hopkins University. “These things can come across as very technical, but when you look at the numbers and you see the billions of dollars flowing … these very seemingly technical details actually matter a lot.”
Amy Gilson, a spokesperson for CalEPA’s environmental health office, said the study’s recommendations are being reviewed. Any potential changes to CalEnviroScreen must “go through a robust scientific evaluation” as well as “extensive public process,” she said.
“CalEnviroScreen’s methods are transparent to allow for these types of outside evaluations, and we welcome discussion on the merits of different approaches,” Gilson said in an emailed statement to CalMatters.
CalEnviroScreen identifies neighborhoods by census tracts — localized regions that typically include between 1,000 and 8,000 residents, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau. California released its fourth iteration of CalEnviroScreen in October 2021.
CalEnviroScreen evaluates 21 environmental, public health, and demographic factors to identify which neighborhoods are most susceptible to environmental harm. Among the factors considered: air pollution and drinking water contaminants, pesticide usage, toxic releases, low birth weight infants, poverty, and unemployment rates. The tool then ranks the 25 percent most disadvantaged communities in California — which determines which neighborhoods get billions of dollars in government and private funds.
Under state law, at least a quarter of funds from the California Climate Investments fund must be spent on these communities. That money comes from California’s cap-and-trade market program, which allows polluters to buy credits to offset their emissions.
In 2022, the fund paid for nearly 19,500 new projects with $1.3 billion, according to the state Air Resources Board. Of that, $933 million was directed to disadvantaged communities or low‑income communities, the air board said.
Huynh said he became interested in CalEnviroScreen’s classification of neighborhoods after reading a 2021 article in The San Francisco Chronicle that found some of San Francisco’s poorest neighborhoods were ineligible for funding, largely due to their ranking in CalEnviroScreen.
“Under such a model with high uncertainty, every subjective model decision is implicitly a value judgment,” the study authors wrote. “Any variation of a model could favor one subpopulation or disfavor another.”
The tool only includes three health factors — low birth weight babies, cardiovascular disease, and emergency room visits for asthma. It leaves out other serious health conditions, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which the authors said could mean that communities with many foreign-born residents are left out. Asthma may be less prevalent among immigrants or they may be less likely to seek emergency room care, but they still have other serious respiratory issues, the study said.
Also left out are other common health problems, such as cancer and kidney disease, which could skew which neighborhoods are designated as disadvantaged. The authors said changing the tool to include these diseases could mean fewer Black communities are designated as disadvantaged. That’s because it would dilute the importance of low birth weight babies, which disproportionately affects Black people.
Race is not a factor in the screening system. But the researchers found that tweaking the model could make big differences for communities of color: For instance, they found that changes in the metrics would mean more nonwhite communities with high poverty levels would be classified as disadvantaged.
The research team suggested some possible solutions “to reduce equity concerns,” such as using multiple models. Doing so would increase the number of designated communities by 10 percent.
“Because there is no singular ‘best’ model, we propose assessing robustness via sensitivity analysis and incorporating additional models accordingly,” the researchers wrote.
In addition, “a safeguard like an external advisory committee comprising domain experts and leaders of local community groups could also help reduce harm by identifying ethical concerns that may have been missed internally.”
Following the hottest year on record, complete with a megadrought in Arizona that led to construction restrictions to reserve groundwater around Phoenix, Arizona has added a new chief heat officer to its Department of Health Services.
The officer’s role is to help with extreme heat preparedness in the state. Dr. Eugene Livar, a physician who was formerly the assistant director for public health preparedness for the Department of Health Services, has been chosen for the role. Dr. Livar had helped in developing the Arizona heat preparedness plan in his former role, The Associated Press reported.
Although Phoenix has its own heat officer, Arizona is the first state to bring on a statewide official dedicated specifically to preparing the public for the effects of extreme heat. The position is part of Arizona’s new Extreme Heat Preparedness Plan, recently announced by Governor Katie Hobbs and the Governor’s Office of Resiliency Director Maren Mahoney.
“What I heard time and again, from everyday Arizonans was that our state’s old approach was not enough,” Hobbs said in a press release.
“Arizona is no stranger to the heat, yet we have always risen to the challenge, protected our neighbors, and built a sustainable and thriving state. This time will be no different,” she added.
The Extreme Heat Preparedness Plan noted that federal funding from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) has been historically allocated in an inequitable way, so Hobbs has requested action to better allocate the funding to help low-income families with weatherization.
The plan has set other short-term goals to reach before summer, including additional support and improvements for cooling centers via a statewide cooling center coordinator. The plan aims to add more cooling centers as well, including six mobile units that use solar power. The state will work toward strengthening power grid resiliency, particularly in rural areas, and providing more information and education on heat-related health outcomes.
For the long-term, the plan outlined several goals for heat preparedness, including growing the workforce specialized in weatherization and energy efficiency, improving heat mitigation design in affordable housing, creating statewide heat-informed community lifelines, building neighborhood Resilience Hubs that offer community support and double as cooling centers, and growing the clean energy economy, among other efforts.
According to the plan, last year included the hottest summer on record for Arizona, which led to a record-high number of heat-related deaths in Maricopa County, The Associated Press reported. The 2023 heat season led to a total of 579 heat-related deaths, as confirmed by Maricopa County Department of Public Health (MCDPH). Statewide, there were over 4,000 emergency room visits for heat-related issues.
“It’s critical that Arizona build a sustainable and resilient state,” Mahoney said. “I’m proud to lead this effort across state agencies and in partnership with various sectors, including health and human service providers, the business community, and scientific experts to protect everyday Arizonans and ensure we have the tools we need.”
Rick Bass is an American author of more than thirty books, both fiction and non-fiction, on a wide range of topics. An environmental activist, he is also an artist drawn to the beauty of the natural world. The winner of numerous awards, his most recent essay collection, With Every Great Breath, was released this February by Counterpoint Press and includes three new essays along with a selection of eighteen written over nearly three decades.
Counterpoint Press
Bass is based in the Yaak Valley in Montana. “It’s a land of extremes and superlatives,” he says. Through the Yaak Valley Forest Council, Bass and a group of locals work to preserve the valley from logging, and are also trying to convince the U.S. Forest Service to reroute the Pacific Northwest Trail away from grizzly bear habitat, of which there are only 25 remaining in the Yaak. He’s also involved in a campaign to make the Yaak a climate refuge. The following are excerpts from a conversation with him from his home in Montana, as he was making a chili dinner.
What makes the Yaak Valley special?
Its uniqueness, its singularity, is its duality, essentially a paradox. It’s two things – the major ecosystem driver is rocks, and yet because we’re at the edge of the Rocky Mountains, a major landscape driver is also fire. There is an extraordinary amount of biological diversity here. Twenty-five percent of the state of Montana’s list of sensitive species are found in this one national forest a long way up in the northwest corner. It’s the wettest place in Montana, it’s the lowest elevation, it’s the northernmost.
Why should the Yaak Valley be considered a climate refuge? (Bass recently wrote about this here.)
It’s a place to preserve this incredible habitat and diversity to buy some time and try to slow the rate of climate change. That’s where the advocacy for the old forests comes in. Historically, the Yaak was as much as 50 percent old growth, and now there’s only about 10 percent old growth. Old growth is an incredible mechanism for storing carbon for long-term safe keeping. The climate refuge would be an experiment in what that would look like – how would you go about returning the landscape to its historic range of variability of old and mature forest.
The Yaak Valley from Garver Mountain, Kootenai National Forest, on July 9, 2012. U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Region
Where does that campaign stand right now?
All campaigns take a long time, but we’re proceeding at the local, state and national level. Everybody we talk to is enthused about the idea, but you know, government takes a good while to enact it. There’s about a hundred million acres of old and mature forests on public land around the U.S., so our quarter-million acre proposal is pretty small.
How do you look at activism now, not only for you but for others, as opposed to 20, 30, 40 years ago?
With the passage of time, as populations grow and resource pressures accrue, it gets harder and harder to feel that one person can make a difference, or that even a group of people can make a difference. As an activist and as an artist, it’s really important for me to try to find means and mechanisms for which people can feel engaged. There’s a lot of donor fatigue out there. It might take more creativity to become a successful advocate now than in the past. That’s my experience, anyways.
The title piece is about the past and the future of pollutants and activism. (The essay discusses the devastating health impact of the mining of vermiculite from Montana.) Where are we headed? Are pollutants getting worse, are the problems getting worse?
When I started working on that, it was hyper-specific and intensely local. One of the least populated parts of western Montana, one of the largest geographic areas and counties in the state of Montana. Again, I guess a common theme was out of sight from the public eye. The elimination of truth that reporting can bring to any issue. Anybody who’s got their head out of the sand and is looking around at the world is, I think, aware of the good and evil battle between the two major political parties in this country, trying to determine whether those things be regulated and accounted and monitored, or not, and it is, along with climate change, the battle of our time.
You write in a new essay, “Who knows how we come to things?” Would you say that you come to things by looking out the window?
When I’m writing, I am looking out the window, but when I’m writing I am engaging with my experience with the five senses, the physical world and my experience in it. I’m really fortunate to live here in such a singular landscape, where a lot of those experiences are singular, so it’s a great place to be a thinker as well as an activist.
You worked as an oil and gas geologist in Mississippi before moving west. When you first moved from those areas to Montana, were you struck by that part of the world?
I did not move to Montana intending to tell people what Montana was like. I moved to Montana because I missed the west. After that first year in the valley in 1987, I realized what was being lost, and the rate it was being lost, and the violence with which it was being lost. And I thought, I’ll stop writing fiction for a little while and I’ll spend some time writing about what’s going on out here. It’s been 37 years.
You’ve written about dogs, caribou, rhinos. What about animals appeals to you as a writer and a person living in the world?
What impresses me about animals, whether domesticated or undomesticated, is the degree of their fittedness to the world. They’ve been here a lot longer than our own species, and they have learned to accommodate with power and grace, the world. And we are still working at it. I am never around them without experiencing amazement, admiration, respect. We have a long way to go. We just got here.
What about the Anthropocene? What is your thought on that?
We have just arrived here. Rather than learning to fit the world and integrate gracefully and with connection to all of the rest of the world, we seem to have skated past that step in development, and are simply attempting to shape it to our desires without the deep engagement of knowledge. And the consequences are writ large in the script of misery.
What do you think the final extraction might look like? When the final drop of oil, or the final piece of coal is taken out of the ground? What would that moment be like?
There’s a line that comes to mind from Peter Matthiessen in his first book of his trilogy, about a poacher in the Everglades. A client was asking where he could procure some rare feather… The poacher studied on it and answered with some regret, Well, I believe all of those pretty little birds have done flown away. I think that would be the response to the last barrel of oil or last turn of coal taken. I believe it’s all gone away. You know, with absolute lack of ownership in the leave-taking.
