Prioritizing Justice in New York State Climate Policy

In 2019, New York State passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), which requires the state to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050 while lowering the disproportionate air pollution burden in disadvantaged communities.

Over the past three years, a partnership between Resources for the Future (RFF) and the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance (NYC-EJA) has sought to evaluate policy options that New York State could adopt to support communities historically left out of the policymaking process.

This project is part of RFF’s environmental justice portfolio, which includes research on Justice40 implementation, industrial and power plant emissions, air quality, and the growing role that environmental justice can play in environment and resource economics research. NYC-EJA is a nonprofit membership network that links grassroots organizations from low-income neighborhoods and communities of color in their struggle for environmental justice.

Through research and modeling projects together, the team has found that when communities shape climate policy, disadvantaged New Yorkers could see better air quality and emissions reduction outcomes.

If you have any questions about the project, please contact Molly Robertson at [email protected]. 

How could CLCPA policies be designed to improve air quality in disadvantaged communities? 

The first report, published in September 2023, investigates two policy cases that could meet the CLCPA’s air quality goals: 1) a case that reflects recommendations by the state’s Climate Action Council, and 2) a more ambitious case that is based on the policy priorities of New York’s environmental and climate justice stakeholders.

The research team finds that New York’s most vulnerable communities—especially elderly Black New Yorkers—benefit from greater air quality improvements under environmental justice stakeholders’ suite of recommendations.

How could New York’s cap-trade-and-invest program be designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in disadvantaged communities? 

This report takes a closer look at one of the policies New York State is leaning on most heavily to meet the emissions reduction requirements established by the CLCPA: cap-trade-and-invest. The team explores guardrails in the cap-trade-and-invest program that could redistribute conventional pollutant emissions reductions for the benefit of disadvantaged communities.

In this report, the research team finds that a cap-trade-and-invest policy that includes carbon dioxide emissions caps for the residential, transportation, and electric power sectors, as well as specific carbon dioxide caps for each power plant, can reduce copollutant emissions near disadvantaged communities without increasing program costs.

How could disadvantaged communities be affected if the state opts to exclude the power sector from cap-trade-and-invest? 

Building on work published in March 2024, this issue brief explores ways to make the state's cap-trade-and-invest system more effective at reducing copollutant emissions near disadvantaged communities. The analysis explores the emissions effects of requiring power sector facilities to purchase carbon dioxide allowances under the program and capping carbon dioxide emissions from individual power plants.

The analysis shows that regulating the New York power sector under cap-trade-and invest and including facility-specific caps—rather than leaving the sector to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative’s cap and trade system and to other existing policies—offers the greatest greenhouse gas and copollutant emissions improvements statewide. The benefits are especially pronounced for areas surrounding disadvantaged communities.

How could different cap-trade-and-invest designs impact air quality for NY communities? 

Building on previously published emissions analysis of cap-trade-and-invest designs, this issue brief goes further to investigate how harmful co-pollutant emissions migrate and interact to create particulate matter concentrations near disadvantaged communities. Particulate matter is known to have extremely harmful health impacts and is a key metric of air quality. The analysis explores the air quality impacts of a cap-trade-and-invest program without electricity sector obligation, with electricity obligation, and added rules capping carbon dioxide emissions from individual power plants.

The analysis shows that all cap-trade-and-invest designs create average air quality improvements over a business as usual case, but the design matters for where and to what extent air quality improves. The case with electricity sector obligation and additional guardrails on individual power plants generates the greatest average PM₂.₅ reductions compared to business as usual. Benefits are most pronounced for communities with historically poor air quality.

We would like to thank Environmental Defense Fund; the Energy Foundation; the Environmental Justice Data Fund; a project of the Windward Fund; and other supporters of RFF for providing funding that helped make this research possible. The work does not represent the positions of Environmental Defense Fund, the Energy Foundation, the Environmental Justice Data Fund, or the Windward Fund.