Audience: Frontline Communities

California and the US are increasingly beset by climate-fueled disasters like wildfires, extreme heat, and power blackouts. These events put additional stress on frayed hard and social infrastructure systems, and disproportionately impact working-class communities of color. To adapt to these changes, society must update our notion of disaster response to increase resilience in these systems before disasters strike. This report offers two models for this response: 1) building and normalizing resilience hubs where community members gather and organize both in good times and bad, and 2) increasing in-home resilience by recognizing homecare workers as effective agents for assisting vulnerable populations and bridging authorities and the frontlines. The report goes on to recommend specific ways to set up resilience hubs, train care workers, and develop forward-thinking emergency response plans to avert human disasters after natural disasters.

This report looks at the intersection of pollution from refining and burning fossil fuels, repiratory diseases caused or exacerbated by this pollution, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and race and racial inequality in the United States. It makes the case that the CARES Act constitutes a bailout of the dirty energy sector that spent more to prop-up the fossil fuel industry than it did on health care supplies and investments, even as this industry contributes to the adverse health outcomes from the COVID-19 pandemic in communities of color. The report’s key findings also link large financial sector players like big banks, asset management companies, private equity and insurance companies to the chain of carbon and chemical emissions that have disproprotionately negative impacts on communities of color and low-income communities.            

The first chapter of the Washington State Environmental Justice Task Force (EJTF)’s Fall 2020 report provides context for what environmental justice (EJ) is, how to build on existing EJ work in Washington, and why state government must prioritize addressing EJ issues and environmental health disparities. The second chapter focuses on the EJTF’s process for developing recommendations, a statewide EJ definition, and EJ principles. The final chapter of the report includes all EJTF recommendations. The report appendices include additional resources, including guidance developed by the EJTF’s Community Engagement Subcommittee for how state agencies can develop their own community engagement plans.