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California is again updating CalEnviroScreen, the pollution and health “tracker” the state uses to identify which communities should receive cleanup funding. The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, which manages the tool, said the update is the fifth iteration and is being shaped with community organizations and planned public meetings before a final version is released this summer.
Officials said the revised tool was designed with input from eight community organizations, including the Environmental Health Coalition, UNIDOS Network and Comite Civico del Valle. They said the latest update adds two indicators intended to capture additional vulnerability and risk: diabetes prevalence and small air toxic sites, which state officials said can reflect added exposures from sources such as urban oil wells and dry cleaners.
The update also includes data improvements within the tool’s broader set of indicators. State officials said one change adds children’s blood lead levels as part of the risk assessment for lead exposure from housing, among other refinements across CalEnviroScreen’s 21 other indicators.
The state said it will hold virtual and in-person public meetings this month to gather feedback, and officials said they expect to publish a final version in the summer. Álvaro Alvarado, the environmental agency’s supervising toxicologist, said the effort depends on ongoing updates. “We listen to stakeholders, community groups, academics, government agencies to understand any new layers that might be needed to better characterize both the pollution burden and the population vulnerability,” he said.
California’s cap-and-invest program, which raises money through greenhouse gas auctions, includes a requirement that at least 25% of the funds go to the most disadvantaged communities. Under state law, CalEnviroScreen has been used since 2014 to define those communities, including the top 25% of census tracts in the state’s definition.
Laura August, the agency’s environmental program manager, said the latest changes do not “dramatically” shift which tracts are identified. She said the Bay Area and Central Valley decreased in the ranking slightly, and she said about 80% of communities designated as disadvantaged remain unchanged in the new update.
Environmental advocates said the improvements are welcome but argued the tool still leaves out information that matters locally. They highlighted concerns that CalEnviroScreen does not incorporate measures such as tree canopy coverage or wildfire smoke data, and they pointed to the need for “ground-truthing” to identify polluting sources and stressors at the neighborhood level. Rebecca Overmyer-Velazquez, a coordinator for the Clean Air Coalition of North Whittier and Avocado Heights, said, “It would need to have the kind of ground-truthing work … which is to literally walk the neighborhood and count and calculate all the different polluting sources (and stressors) like heat islands and lack of tree cover and water stress.”
Beyond what data gets included, researchers have questioned whether CalEnviroScreen’s design itself can create blind spots. In 2024, researchers with Johns Hopkins University found that CalEnviroScreen 4.0 was subjective enough that some communities could be missing out on billions of dollars. Benjamin Huynh, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said the modeling choices can implicitly influence who is funded. “If you’re the model developer, even if you don’t feel that you have any personal biases or you’re not thinking about it, all those choices that you make when you make the model, you are implicitly deciding who gets funding and who doesn’t,” he said.
Advocates said the outcome depends not only on what the tool measures, but also on how agencies use it. CalEnviroScreen emerged in part from advocacy by environmental justice leaders in the 1990s, but advocates said they remain uncertain whether funded programs have consistently delivered pollution reductions, or whether agencies apply CalEnviroScreen results strongly enough in their own policies. Bradley Angel, director of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, said the state has not used the tool to block harmful activity at the permitting stage, arguing that advocates originally focused on health rather than funding allocation. “It’s great that CalEnviroScreen exists … but when communities and environmental justice groups were advocating for what became CalEnviroScreen, they weren’t looking at dollar signs. They were looking to protect our health,” Angel said.
State agencies do use EnviroScreen results in some decisions, officials said. The Air Resources Board has used EnviroScreen to determine which communities take part in its Community Air Protection program, which aims to reduce air pollution. A draft regulation from the Department of Toxic Substances Control said it would use CalEnviroScreen as a proxy for cumulative impacts in permitting decisions, but advocates criticized the approach, saying it does not prevent the department from issuing hazardous waste permits. Angel said the state is not matching CalEnviroScreen’s information with enforcement. “Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, (the department) pays lip service to CalEnviroScreen’s own information,” he said.
Advocates pointed to other states as examples of what they called more enforceable uses of cumulative impact indicators. Caroline Farrell, director of the Environmental Law and Justice Clinic at Golden Gate University, said New Jersey’s approach offers a model for requiring polluting facilities to use the data tool to analyze cumulative impacts and for regulators to deny permits when facilities cannot avoid harm to overburdened communities. “The tool is just a tool,” Farrell said. “You’ve got to be able to figure out how you want to utilize it in a way that actually changes things on the ground for communities.”