Advancing Health and Energy Equity in the United States

Project Partner: Dr. Jalonne White-Newsome, EGE2 Empowering a Green Environment & Economy, LLC, Summer 2021

Project Summary: Air pollution and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions disproportionately impact low-income communities and communities of color, making them particularly vulnerable to climate change. Meanwhile, in these same communities, access to investment in clean energy is limited. Through her internship with EGE2, Yasmin provided research support to the Institute for Market Transformation and the Institute for Sustainable Communities (the clients) in order to understand opportunities for advancing clean energy in climate-vulnerable communities through case studies across the United States. Yasmin assembled available local and state-level data on primary GHG emissions from the building and industry sector, community sociodemographic attributes, and environmental health. She also developed and implemented the quantitative analysis of building and industry sector emissions. This research informed a final report to clients that included 1) an assessment of available and missing data for the building and industry sectors in case study communities, 2) proposed mitigation interventions based on GHG emissions analysis, 3) barriers to adoption of clean energy investments, 4) recommended approaches to support interventions by way of key informant interviews, and 5) identified opportunities to align mitigation interventions with economic development.

Project Deliverables:

  1. A generalizable written description of the methodological approach used in the buildings and industry quantitative analysis (link for download).
  2. A database template including the description and location of available local and state level secondary data sources pertaining to building GHG emissions, industry GHG emissions, sociodemographic attributes, and environmental health for study communities (link for download).
Figure shows total emissions (MTCO2e) of non-residential buildings in Los Angeles that reported benchmarking data in 2019, spatially stratified by income level (low income vs. all other income)

Hear more about Yasmin’s internship from her lightning talk during our Fall 2021 Intro Workshop!

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