Our Research

CBE Reports and Publications

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Environmental Justice

  • CBE Comments to AQMD RE: Communications to Communities During and After Explosions, Fires, Spills, and Other Accidents in the District, July 2019
  • CEJA Comments on Draft Community Air Protection Blueprint Pursuant to AB 617, July 2018
  • CBE Comments on Draft Community Air Protection Blueprint pursuant to AB 617, July 2018
  • Latest CBE Report: Crude Injustice/ La Cruda Injusticia (Full Report) English & Spanish, June 2015
    Californians of color are more likely to live in the oil train blast zone, the dangerous one-mile evacuation zone in the case of an oil train derailment and fire. “It’s simple, oil trains contribute to environmental racism in California,” says Nile Malloy, Northern California Program Director, Communities for a Better Environment. “Environmental justice communities like Richmond and Wilmington that already live with the highest risk are hardest hit. It’s time for a just and quick transition to clean energy.” While 60 percent of Californians live in environmental justice communities – communities with racial minorities, low income, or non-English speaking households – 80 percent of the 5.5 million Californians with homes in the blast zone live in environmental justice communities.Nine out of ten of California’s largest cities on oil train routes have an even higher rate of discriminatory impact than the state average. In these cities, 82–100 percent of people living in the blast zone are in environmental justice communities.  “The maps paint a scary picture of who lives with threat of explosions and the health risks from pollution and disruption from dangerous 100-plus car crude oil trains,” says Matt Krogh, ForestEthics extreme oil campaign director and one of the authors of the report. “In California you are 33 percent more likely to live in the blast zone if you live in a nonwhite, low income, or non-English speaking household.”
  • CBE’s Huntington Park Brown to Green Implementation Plan/ Report, September 2013
  • Hidden Hazards: A Call to Action for Healthy, Livable Communities, December 2010
    In 2004, the Los Angeles Collaborative for Environmental Health and Justice released its first report, Building a Regional Voice for Environmental Justice, taking important steps towards community-based participatory research. In this groundbreaking work, the Liberty Hill Foundation, Communities for a Better Environment, and a team of scholars analyzed the demographic patterns of air emissions using regulatory databases for the Los Angeles region. We documented the clear relationship between toxic exposure and race and income status, providing scientific evidence to corroborate residents’ first-hand knowledge that they were disproportionately impacted by air pollution from such sources as chemically-intensive manufacturing and fossil fuel-based transportation modes.In Hidden Hazards, we provide new evidence of the high density of air pollution hazards and exposure in certain areas of Los Angeles—hazards that are “hidden” from the view of regulatory agencies because they are not contained in their official databases—which harm residents of these areas of concentrated pollution and affect all of the nearly 10 million residents of Los Angeles County.This report also points the way to some promising policy solutions that focus on innovation and bold action rooted at the local level. We present suggestions for local policy solutions that could be readily implemented by municipalities throughout the region. In fact, many of these tools will be familiar to city planners and agencies that already regularly use them in planning and decision-making to address neighborhood development and public health concerns.
  • Building a Regional Voice for Environmental Justice, September 2004
    This report highlights a partnership between Communities for a Better Environment, the Liberty Hill Foundation and a university-based research team (Los Angeles Collaborative for Environmental Health and Justice) – that contributed to turning California into an epicenter of the environmental justice movement over the past several years and helped add to the momentum for major policy reform. The report begins by describing the individual partners and how we integrated our efforts into a collaborative model. We review key highlights of our accomplishments, and analyze the benefits – to us individually, as well as to the work – of the collaborative model. The report also shares the lessons we have learned from working together, and some of the challenges we faced. Lastly, we include a user-friendly supplement that shares the key findings of the research team’s investigations into environmental justice issues in Southern California. We hope that the experience of The Los Angeles Collaborative will provide valuable insight and inspiration for future practitioners, researchers, foundations and community organizations, and that it might open new horizons for collaboration.
  • Building Healthy Communities from the Ground Up: Environmental Justice in California, September 2003 (prepared by Martha Matsuoka)
    The primary goal of the report is to provide a clear, concise landscape of statewide conditions as well as opportunities and challenges for building grassroots power and influence at the state level. The report is written to inform legislators and policymakers of the history of neglect and the lack of compliance and enforcement of environmental protections in California and to identify policy, legislative, program, and investment gaps that have resulted in a statewide environmental justice crisis. This report is also designed as a reference document for strategic planning and for discussions that strengthen and support direct organizing efforts and coalition-building. The recommendations contained in the report range from the general to the specific, but define a strategic direction for building healthy communities and achieving environmental justice in California.