Issues

Environmental Justice

For over 45 years Communities for a Better Environment has worked in California’s frontline urban communities to support organizing and litigation to prevent and reduce environmental hazards.

The principles of environmental justice say that access to clean air, water and soil and a healthy, safe, livable community are intrinsic human rights.

Low-income communities of color face the greatest risks from environmental hazards. They are most likely to live with local sources of industrial pollution concentrated in or near their neighborhoods and close to heavily-traveled highways. 

Black Americans are most likely to live in cities with high rates of industrial pollution, and—within any metro area—both Latine and Black communities live with poor environmental quality. This puts them at higher risk for asthma, cardiovascular and respiratory disease, cancer, and birth defects. And these same communities tend to be stressed by poverty, unemployment, and inadequate access to health care or healthful food choices. 

This is environmental injustice.

CBE exists to support people on the frontlines of pollution in California in their fight for environmental justice.

Climate Justice = Environmental Justice

CBE works with California communities living with the effects of local pollution, but our fight includes standing with indigenous communities across the globe threatened by climate change.

The majority of Earth’s seven billion inhabitants don’t live in the industrialized societies whose economies benefit from burning fossil fuels. But everyone lives with effects of climate change—drought that kills livestock and burns miles of cropland, or rising oceans that could soon devastate entire island nations.

We are committed to advocating for policies that combat climate change and sustain, protect and support communities around the world. Through our clean energy work, CBE is working to usher a just transition away from reliance on fossil fuels, toward an energy system that is renewable and regenerative, rather than one that causes climate chaos.

Issue Areas

  • Issue

    Clean Energy

    Climate change, pollution, and the ever-increasing economic costs—these are the prices we pay for our society’s reliance on fossil fuels. CBE is on the front lines in the fight for a just transition away from fossil fuels toward safer, renewable energy.

  • Issue

    Climate Justice

    The communities we work with are some of the communities most harmed by fossil fuel pollution and greenhouse gas emissions in California. CBE fights to ensure that environmental justice communities are prioritized in California’s climate policy.

  • Issue

    Equity and Hydrogen

    Our communities border oil refineries, gas-fired power plants, industrial farming operations, fossil fuel extraction facilities, waste processing centers, ports, transportation corridors and other polluting operations. As the state works to expand use of hydrogen as a fuel, we demand equitable participation and transparency in funding hydrogen infrastructure.

  • Issue

    Green Economy

    The emerging green economy is an incredible opportunity for the environmental justice community. CBE has worked since 1978 in support of low-income communities and people of color in California in the fight to reduce and prevent the local pollution that endangers health and undermines their quality of life. The environmental justice movement that has grown from that work can shape this budding green economy.

  • Issue

    Green Zones

    Picture a Green Zone as a community transformed—from a highly polluted, economically depressed neighborhood into a vibrant area with green business practices, a healthier environment and a stronger economic future. CBE is taking the lead in California to create Green Zones locally and across the state, which can be models for efforts across the United States.