For the past five years at the request of vulnerable communities and climate advocacy groups, Professors Clair Brown and Julia Walsh have worked together to assess specific climate policies. These groups are seeking evidence-based evaluations to advocate for legislation and regulations that better serve their communities while reducing emissions. Unfortunately, climate policies often focus on reducing emissions but fail to incorporate equity into their design.
Legislators and agency staff frequently lack the resources to undertake necessary policy evaluations, relying instead on industry-provided information that can distort costs and outcomes. While some UC Berkeley researchers are already studying the effects of climate change on disadvantaged communities, these studies typically analyze policies already in effect rather than offering policy proposals for integrating equity and emissions reduction into policy design.
We launched the Climate and Society Center (CSC) to bridge these gaps–integrating equity into climate policy design through community engagement and ensuring California policymakers have timely access to these evidence-based findings.
California’s climate policies serve as a model for greenhouse gas mitigation nationally and internationally. So much of the cost of climate change is borne disproportionately by lower income communities. While the transition to a clean energy economy will entail new job opportunities, the economic displacement will disproportionately impact workers without a college degree. The Institute for Research on Labor and Employment has a long history of research on economic inequality and the distributional consequences of changes in labor market policy and the structure of the economy. The Climate and Society Center will build on this intellectual history with an explicit focus on the climate change challenge.
Since its founding, UC Berkeley has always been committed to improving the world. The Climate and Society Center will continue this legacy by facilitating the incorporation of Berkeley faculty’s expertise into California equitable climate policies. By facilitating dialogue and collaboration among policymakers, community stakeholders, and Berkeley researchers, we will ensure the voices of disadvantaged communities are elevated in order to develop equitable, data-driven climate policies.
Key initiatives include supporting faculty and graduate student climate equity research, engaging communities in research design, producing policy briefs that highlight faculty work, and organizing discussions with legislative and regulatory staff to demonstrate the net benefits of specific climate policies.
The application of modern social sciences approaches to studying equity and the distributional impacts of policy present a unique opportunity for our new center to inform climate policy. These approaches include both empirical research documenting impacts of sectoral shifts and policy on workers throughout the income distribution, ethnographic work recording and interpreting the experiences of workers and communities disproportionately impacted, as well as complex policy simulations used to evaluate the relative merits of alternative policy choices. Some UC Berkeley researchers across campus use these tools to rigorously study both equity and climate policy. CSC will harness this energy and expertise and provide a vehicle for collaboration among faculty and students and the dissemination of research findings to policy makers.
The CSC will connect faculty, community activists, and policymakers to collaboratively address specific climate challenges. Structured faculty-community gatherings and collaborative policy development will lead to high-quality research aimed at promoting both emissions reduction and improved outcomes for vulnerable communities. Public outreach efforts will help translate the research into effective, equitable climate equity policies.
CSC researchers have evaluated policies like California’s Health Setback Buffer Zone, which aims to reduce the harmful impacts of oil operations on families and communities. Center researchers have assessed the net benefits of other climate policies, including the economic and health impacts of eliminating coal exports from Richmond Port and how fossil fuel divestment fulfills pension funds’ fiduciary duty, aiding local and state lawmakers in passing effective legislation.
One ongoing project, related to the proposed Federal Polluters Pay Climate Fund, evaluates the costs and health impacts of past emissions over a past period, and uses these public costs to charge a fee for the major oil polluters. The fees will be used to help improve the health in vulnerable communities and to pay for climate-related policies to mitigate pollution.
Researchers tend to focus on emissions reduction in designing policies or developing new technology, with the assumption that emissions reduction benefits everyone equally. However, research has shown that vulnerable communities continue to suffer disproportionately from air pollution and climate change. Policies need to be designed that both improve the lives of the vulnerable communities and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and evaluation of policies and new technology must include the impact on health of vulnerable communities as well as on global GHG emissions.
By collaborating with vulnerable communities and providing scientific, data-based results, the CSC will strengthen and elevate the voices of vulnerable communities to ensure the policies integrate both of these outcomes: reduction of GHG emissions and benefits for these communities.
There are many historic examples of public policies that have been pursued with insufficient attention to distributional consequences. Approaches to policy creation that simply pursue changes with positive net benefits but ignore who benefits and who loses can engender political backlash and prove to be counterproductive in the long run. The changes to our economy needed to address a problem of the magnitude of climate change requires broad support and participation from all communities. The Climate and Society Center aims to provide the rigorous research needed for the policy process to consider distributional consequences as integral to evaluating policy alternatives.
When Professor Clark Kerr became the founding IRLE Director in 1945, faculty and students across many departments joined together to conduct research promoting improved quality of life, jobs with good wages and benefits, and policies for a sustainable equitable economy. IRLE has always focused on improving both the economy and society. With the existential threat of climate change, the new Climate and Society Center will continue this tradition of supporting scientific research that is used to develop policies that improve the quality of life for working people.
The major consequences of global warming entail worsening health, especially in disadvantaged communities. Public health faculty have been working with vulnerable communities to measure health problems, assess climate-related determinants of poor health, and identify effective interventions. Improved health benefits are a critical part of evaluating alternate climate policies.
We invite faculty and students who work on climate equity to join the CSC and learn how we support their research, community engagement, and outreach to policymakers. Together we can contribute to improving climate equity policies and the lives of people in California and around the world.