Environmental Justice

To advance environmental justice effectively over the long-term, the Air District must practice restorative justice by creating agency-wide policies, practices, procedures, and norms that both recognize the trauma and adverse health impacts caused by environmental racism and honor the emotional work and investment of time that is required for staff and community leaders to work together effectively in advancing environmental justice.

The Air District must value the voices, lived experience, and leadership of environmental justice communities, develop respectful relationships and partnerships with these communities, hire from these communities, view these communities as a resource, provide compensation for their time and expertise, gather their input, use that input to directly inform decision-making, and establish formal participatory processes for addressing and implementing community input and increasing agency accountability to communities.

The field of Environmental Justice is inherently intersectional and interdisciplinary. Therefore, the Air District must dismantle internal silos by reorganizing and restructuring to build an agency structure and culture that supports cross-divisional work.

For staff to better enact environmental justice, the Air District must cultivate a culture of innovation, embrace learning by doing, and adopt clear definitions for environmental justice and equity (and related terms) that are grounded in community input.

For staff and community leaders to have the meaningful agency support needed to advance Environmental Justice, 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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.