California Climate Investments Resource Portal
Providing Benefits to Priority Populations
California Climate Investments are focused on providing benefits to the State’s most disadvantaged communities and low‑income communities and households, collectively referred to as priority populations.
Equity and environmental justice issues are core to California Climate Investments. Across the portfolio, California Climate Investments is continually working to target investments where they are most needed; foster equitable access to funds through outreach, technical assistance, and capacity building; and support community priorities and leadership.
Background
California Air Resources Board
Learn about priority populations and how California Climate Investments programs are providing benefits.
California Air Resources Board
Information on statutory investment minimums for disadvantaged communities and low-income communities and households and details for applying designations in California Climate Investments program design and implementation.
Mapping Tools
Identify if a project, activity, resource, etc., is located within a census tract identified by CalEPA as a disadvantaged community or low-income community, or directly benefit residents of a low-income household.
California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment
A screening tool used to help identify communities disproportionately burdened by multiple sources of pollution and with population characteristics that make them more sensitive to pollution.
California Air Resources Board
This map shows disadvantaged communities and low-income communities as defined for California Climate Investments. To see if a particular location is within a disadvantaged community or low-income community, either navigate to the desired location on the map, search for the location by address, or enter a 10 digit census tract number in the search bar. Layers can be adjusted using the layer tool. Census tracts that are both disadvantaged and low-income blend to a color not represented in the legend if overlapping.
Identify Needs and Report Benefits
Projects report benefits to priority populations by using benefit criteria tables.
California Air Resources Board
Benefit Criteria Tables are used by administering agencies and applicants to identify the priority populations that will benefit from the project, and determine how the project will meaningfully address an important community or household need and provide a benefit.
Projects benefiting priority populations provide direct, meaningful, and assured benefits to a community. In order to identify a need and the steps necessary to meaningfully address that need, administering agencies, applicants, and/or funding recipients are strongly encouraged to directly engage local community residents and community-based organizations.
Examples of direct engagement include hosting community meetings or workshops, consulting community-based organizations or focus groups, conducting community surveys, or other community engagement efforts to gather local input on important community needs. Explore community engagement and outreach resources to learn more.
While community engagement is strongly recommended, for limited project types, community engagement may not be feasible. Administering agencies, applicants, and/or funding recipients can either receive documentation of broad support for a proposed project from local community residents and community-based organizations, or identify individual factors in CalEnviroScreen that most impact a disadvantaged or low-income community. If none of the above approaches are feasible, administering agencies, applicants, and/or funding recipients can identify common community needs from the list of common needs.
Provide Benefits
California Strategic Growth Council
If your organization isn’t ready yet to apply for a planning or implementation grant, find resources here to help you prepare for success. Through the Community Assistance for Climate Equity (CACE) suite of programs, SGC provides technical assistance and capacity building to help under-resourced communities access critical funding resources, implement high-impact projects, and enact community-led initiatives.
Governor’s Office of Planning and Research
This checklist is intended to assist State agencies to ensure that plans and investments identify and protect the State’s most vulnerable populations. This checklist can be used alongside any decision-making process to improve equitable outcomes.
Explore resources that can be used to provide technical assistance in a way that advances equity and builds community capacity to secure funding and implement projects that can help reverse past disinvestment.
California Air Resources Board
Community Connections is a tool to help organizations and agencies find partners interested in California Climate Investments. Partnerships ensure that project proposals reflect the perspectives needed to build resilient communities and implement meaningful investment.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
EPA's environmental justice mapping and screening tool that provides EPA with a nationally consistent dataset and approach for combining environmental and demographic socioeconomic indicators. EJScreen users choose a geographic area; the tool then provides demographic socioeconomic and environmental information for that area. All of the EJScreen indicators are publicly-available data. EJScreen simply provides a way to display this information and includes a method for combining environmental and demographic indicators into EJ indexes.
California Strategic Growth Council
The Hub is designed to enable practitioners, policymakers, and communities at any point in their racial equity journey to increase access and understanding to relevant resources and best practices.
California Air Resources Board
Example guidance from the Sustainable Transportation Equity Project (STEP), where applicants must directly engage community residents, in all phases of the STEP proposal’s development and implementation to ensure projects provide direct, meaningful, and assured benefits to STEP Community residents. While quantity of outreach and engagement is important, STEP Applicants should also prioritize the quality of their outreach and engagement, including targeted outreach and engagement to hard-to-reach residents.
California Air Resources Board
Example guidance from Sustainable Transportation Equity Project (STEP), where applicants are encouraged to consider how to identify and avoid substantial economic, environmental, and public health burdens in disadvantaged and low-income communities that may occur due to STEP-funded projects and that may lead to the physical or economic displacement of low-income households and small businesses.
California Air Resources Board
Example guidance from the Sustainable Transportation Equity Project (STEP) where applicants are encouraged to consider how projects can increase adaptability and build resilience to the specific impacts of climate change on the STEP Community over each project’s lifetime.
Governor's Office of Planning and Research
This document provides this guidance in a step-by-step process with specific guidance on prioritizing actions that promote equity and foster community resilience. While this guidance is aimed at state agencies in particular, it can be applied to the local and regional scales.
