Day: February 20, 2022

The Biden administration has released a screening tool to help identify disadvantaged communities long plagued by environmental hazards, but it won’t include race as a factor in deciding where to devote resources.

Administration officials told reporters Friday that excluding race will make projects less likely to draw legal challenges and will be easier to defend, even as they acknowledged that race has been a major factor in terms of who experiences environmental injustice.

The decision was harshly challenged by members of the environmental justice community.

“It’s a major disappointment and it’s a major flaw in trying to identify those communities that have been hit hardest by pollution,” said Robert Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University in Houston and a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council.

President Joe Biden has made combating climate change a priority of his administration and pledged in a sweeping executive order to “deliver environmental justice in communities all across America.” The order, signed his first week in office, sets a goal that the 40% of overall benefits from climate and environment investments would go to disadvantaged communities. The tool is a key component for carrying out that so-called Justice40 Initiative.

Brenda Mallory, chair of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, said the tool will help direct federal investments in climate, clean energy and environmental improvements to communities “that have been left out and left behind for far too long.”

Catherine Coleman Flowers, a member of the advisory council who served on a working group that gave the Biden administration recommendations for the tool, said she agrees with the move to exclude race as an indicator.

She said that this tool is a good start that hopefully will improve with time and that it’s better than creating a tool that includes race as a factor and then gets struck down by the Supreme Court. She said, “race is a factor, but race isn’t the only factor.”

“Being marginalized in other ways is a factor,” she said.

The screening tool uses 21 factors, including air pollution, health outcomes and economic status, to identify communities that are most vulnerable to environmental and economic injustice.

But the omission of race as a factor goes against a deep body of scientific research showing that race is the greatest determinant of who experiences environmental harm, environmental justice experts pointed out.

“This was a political decision,” said Sacoby Wilson, associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Health. “This was not a scientific decision or a data-driven decision.” Wilson has studied the distribution of environmental pollutants and helped develop mapping tools like the one the Council on Environmental Quality released Friday.

This isn’t the first such tool to exist in the United States, or even in the federal government. California, Maryland, Michigan and New Jersey have had tools like this for years. And the Environmental Protection Agency has a similar tool, EJ Screen. Many of those screening tools include some information about the racial makeup of communities along with environmental and health data.

The public has 60 days to use the tool and provide feedback on it. The Council on Environmental Quality also announced Friday that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine are working on launching a study of existing tools. 
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 Sparked by global warming and other forms of climate change, tropical butterflies are starting to arrive in Hong Kong and Taiwan in greater numbers, while temperate-zone species like the monarch appear to be dwindling in the region, conservationists told RFA.

“Seven new butterfly species were discovered in Hong Kong in 2021, including swallowtails, gray butterflies, and nymphs; most of them were tropical species,” Gary Chan, project officer at Hong Kong’s Fengyuan Butterfly Reserve, told RFA.

“Breeding records were found in Hong Kong for several of these species, which indicates that these weren’t just strays arriving in Hong Kong with horticultural imports or the monsoon,” Chan said.

According to Chan, Neptis cartica and Ancema blanka were both found in Hong Kong for the first time in 2021, along with Zeltus amasa, which is usually native to Malaysia, Thailand, India, Myanmar, Borneo and other points south of Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, tropical migrants are also being spotted in Taiwan, according to Hsu Yu-feng, a butterfly expert at Taiwan National Normal University.

Between 1985 and 2008, at least seven new species of tropical butterfly were found to have settled on the island, including Appias olfern peducaea, which traveled north from the Philippines to settle in the southern port city of Kaohsiung in 2000.

Even butterflies once found only in southern Taiwan are now found across the island, Hsu told RFA.

“When I was an undergraduate student in the 1980s, I went to Kenting [on the southern coast] to see Graphium agamemnon,” Hsu recalled. “Then, I saw it for the first time on this university college campus last year, and it was breeding here.”

Southeast Asia warming faster

Troides aeacus kaguya is another example of a butterfly that once only lived in southern Taiwan, and can now be found all over the island, he said.

The changes come as temperatures in East and Southeast Asia have risen more rapidly than the global average in recent decades, Chan said.

“There are many more places where tropical butterflies and other insects can breed, so that’s why we’re seeing this northward migration, or dispersal behavior,” he said.

Hsu said the butterflies didn’t actually migrate, however; rather, their habitats are expanding due to rising temperatures.

“Once upon a time, the more northerly areas were colder, and not suitable for them to settle in, but they are suitable now, because temperatures have risen,” Hsu said.

“The north is warming at a higher rate than the south, meaning the difference in temperatures between north and south has been reduced,” he said. “That’s why southern butterflies are now living in the north.”

But the changes are forcing out butterflies that need a temperate climate to breed in, experts said.

Few monarchs now

The Siu Lang Shui conservation site in Hong Kong’s Tuen Mun district once saw tens of thousands of monarch butterflies spending the winter, as recently as 2013 and 2014, Chan said.

But numbers have fallen sharply in recent years, he said.

In Taiwan, the purple variegated butterflies that once overwintered in their millions in the Maolin valley outside Kaohsiung have also been dwindling in recent years, preferring to move north to seek out colder temperatures earlier in the year.

The warming environment is also becoming more hostile to temperate tree species some butterflies call home, Hsu told RFA.

“The Taiwan-endemic butterfly Sibataniozephyrus kuafui uses the Taiwan beech as a host plant … so in contrast to the expansion of tropical butterflies, temperate species are being threatened,” he said.

The changes in East Asia come after a study published in the journal Science in 2021 found that populations of most butterfly species in western North America have declined by nearly 50% over the past 40 years.

“California is the place with the most endemic species of butterflies in western North America,” Hsu said. “California butterflies are most vulnerable to drought, because this is a Mediterranean climate zone, with dry summers and rainy winters.”

“If climate change causes droughts in winter, plants will grow poorly, and the larvae of butterflies will have nothing to eat,” he said.
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