Panel Paper:
Environmental Justice and Water Policy During a Drought: Community Stressors, Minority Residents, and Cutback Assignments
Saturday, November 4, 2017
Stetson E (Hyatt Regency Chicago)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
In 2014 the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) released CalEnviroScreen 2.0, which was developed as part of CalEPA’s environmental justice program to identify communities facing “multiple burdens of pollution and socioeconomic disadvantage” (http://oehha.ca.gov/calenviroscreen/calenviroscreen-faqs). Contemporaneously, California was suffering a severe drought and, in an effort to curb water usage, CalEPA implemented emergency measures such that each water district was required to cut back water consumption by an assigned percentage based on 2014 water use. A decades-long literature indicates that communities with higher proportions of racial and ethnic minorities also face more environmental burdens. In this context, do these cutback assignments disproportionately affect already burdened communities or communities with higher percentages of minority residents? By employing GIS programing we are able to combine the individual water usage and demographic values of water districts covered by the legislation. Using regression analysis, we then analyze the amount of water each district is allowed to use after mandated reduction, and independent variables such as the CalEnviroScreen measure, race/ethnicity, and population density to see if the mandated water reductions are prone to the same environmental injustice issues that have been seen in other research. Our results indicate that the water cutback assignments did not, ceteris paribus, further stress already burdened communities. However, most minority communities received lower water allowances all else equal, with Hispanics being significantly negatively impacted by the emergency measures. Thus, even in a context in which CalEPA has its own sophisticated measure of environmental burden, minority communities, and especially Hispanics, were more burdened by mandatory water cutbacks.
