Environmental Justice Priorities

Environmental Justice Priorities

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Our Commitment

The Air District is responsible for regulating stationary sources of air pollution in the San Francisco Bay Area. We pass and enforce a wide variety of regulations on industries, businesses, and activities, from wood burning in fireplaces to refining fossil fuels, to ensure air pollution is minimized. We also distribuWith the 2024-2029 Strategic Plan, the Air District commits to proactively advancing environmental justice in and through our work. We commit to understanding and acknowledging the legacy of harmful government policies and environmental racism as the root cause of environmental injustice.

The Air District commits to training employees, executive leadership, and the Air District Board on these issues to ensure we fully understand what it means to advance environmental justice in our work. We will build relationships with communities with environmental justice concerns and honor environmental justice principles to ensure our work is done “with community and not to community.”te over $150 million in state and federal incentive funding every year to reduce air pollution from mobile sources, such as cars, trucks, school buses, port and construction equipment, lawn and garden equipment, and wood-burning stoves and fireplaces.

What is Environmental Justice?

Environmental justice has two primary types of definitions – one type generated from within the advocacy community and one generated by the United States Environmental Protection Agency in 1992. Both are valuable in understanding of environmental justice.

“Environmental justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. This goal will be achieved when everyone enjoys the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards, and equal access to the decision-making process to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn, and work.”

-- Environmental Protection Agency

“Environmental Justice … refers to those cultural norms and values, rules, regulations, behaviors, policies, and decisions [that] support sustainable communities where people can interact with confidence that the environment is safe, nurturing, and productive. Environmental justice is served when people can realize their highest potential … where both cultural and biological diversity are respected and highly revered and where distributive justice prevails.”

-- Dr. Bunyan Bryant, Pioneering Environmental Justice Scholar

The Air District’s Environmental Justice Priorities

1

State Law Inspires Community Partnership

The Air District is responsible for regulating stationary sources of air pollution in the San Francisco Bay Area. We pass and enforce a wide variety of regulations on industries, businesses, and activities, from wood burning in fireplaces to refining fossil fuels, to ensure air pollution is minimized. We also distribuWith the 2024-2029 Strategic Plan, the Air District commits to proactively advancing environmental justice in and through our work. We commit to understanding and acknowledging the legacy of harmful government policies and environmental racism as the root cause of environmental injustice.

The Air District commits to training employees, executive leadership, and the Air District Board on these issues to ensure we fully understand what it means to advance environmental justice in our work. We will build relationships with communities with environmental justice concerns and honor environmental justice principles to ensure our work is done “with community and not to community.”te over $150 million in state and federal incentive funding every year to reduce air pollution from mobile sources, such as cars, trucks, school buses, port and construction equipment, lawn and garden equipment, and wood-burning stoves and fireplaces.

2

Meaningful Agency Support

Air District leadership must: Provide a strong vision and set a clear tone for achieving environmental justice and ensuring that communities of concern breathe clean air; lead the revision of internal policies, practices, and procedures with an equity lens; and lead the revision of mission-related policies, practices, and procedures with an environmental justice lens.

3

Incorporating Environmental Justice into Core Functions

The Air District must prioritize incorporating into its core functions the following environmental justice considerations: community-based science and real-time air monitoring and data collection, public health considerations, cumulative impact analysis, disparate impact analysis and civil rights compliance, and recognition of historical impacts and damages as well as the need for restorative steps.

4

Implement Environmental Justice Best Practices and Innovation

The Air District must create and implement a strategy for incorporating environmental justice best practices and innovation into its day-to-day operations and core functions -- including data collection and analysis, measurement, and monitoring, permitting, environmental analysis, inspections, enforcement, legal actions including litigation, mitigation, planning, rule-making, and incentives funding.

5

Implement Environmental Justice Best Practices and Innovation

The Air District must communicate with clarity, transparency, and integrity to environmental justice communities about the agency’s role, responsibilities, and limitations, as well as where there is room to grow, improve, and bring about transformational change within the agency’s regulatory charge.

6

Growing the Capacity of Staff and Board Members to Integrate Environmental Justice

The Air District must invest in growing the capacity of staff and Board members to integrate environmental justice into their day-to-day roles and responsibilities, developing communities and middle management level on new policies, practices, and procedures, establishing environmental justice as a core competency for staff, prioritizing hiring, retention and promotion of staff with lived experience living in and/ or working in frontline environmental justice communities, and ensuring that staff and leadership at all levels of the agency reflect the diversity of the communities the agency serves.

7

Growing the Capacity of Environmental Justice Communities and Organizations

The Air District must invest in growing the capacity of environmental justice communities and organizations to work effectively with the Air District on systemic change, in creating economic benefits and workforce opportunities in these communities, and in enabling these communities to access and manage resources to address disparities.

8

Seek Appropriate Legal Remedies and Coordinate with Environmental Justice Communities

The Air District must seek appropriate legal remedies, collaborate, and coordinate with environmental justice communities on those remedies, impose high enough penalties, reach deterrence-based outcomes with violators, and ensure that environmental justice communities benefit from and have a say in the use of related funds.

9

Seek Appropriate Legal Remedies and Coordinate with Environmental Justice Communities

The Air District must provide technical assistance to local governments to enable them to more effectively incorporate environmental justice analysis into their local land use, planning and zoning decisionmaking and permitting practices, and must also weigh in on the environmental justice frameworks being developed by cities and counties in the nine Bay Area county jurisdictions as part of their general plan, to integrate environmental justice policy and help establish a plan for implementation and enforcement.