- EO 12898Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in
Minority Populations and Low-Income Populationrequires each
agency to address and identify ...disproportionately high and
adverse human health or environmental effects of its programs, policies,
and activities on minority and low-income populations... (Section
1.1). An analysis of the distribution of benefits and costs of a regulation
across individuals of different races and levels of income serves
to inform decisionmakers of the environmental justice consequences
of OAQPS regulations.
- EO 13045Protection of Children from Environmental Health Risks
and Safety Risksrequires that Federal agencies examine the impacts
of each regulatory action on children for any economically significant
regulation (as defined by EO 12866) that the agency has reason to
believe may disproportionately affect children. This EO implicitly
requires an analysis of the distribution of impacts across age cohorts
within the population for any OAQPS regulation designed to protect
As mentioned above, unevenly distributed economic impacts often result
in concerns about equity and fairness. Although classical economics
and benefit-cost analysis avoid the direct evaluation of fairness, an
analysis of the distribution of impacts across various segments of society
provides decisionmakers with a framework in which to judge the equity
of a regulatory action. In an effort to incorporate notions of
equity and fairness in EPA decisionmaking, OP has drafted Evaluating
the Equity of Environmental Policy Options Based on the Distribution
of Economic Effects: Preliminary Draft ( EPA, 1997g). This
document provides guidance on how to incorporate distributional impacts
analysis into an EA. In particular, the following recommendations
- Do not address very low impact regulations, options, and effects.
For regulations with small distributional impacts, the additional
information provided by an impact analysis may not warrant the resources
required to conduct the analysis.
- Identify and define the personal and demographic characteristics
(e.g., race, age) of concern. In this step, the analyst should list
all expected distributional effects and prioritize them.
- Determine the limits of the analysis by identifying the markets
distributional effects are expected to occur.
- Determine whether distributional impacts exist within the scope
of the analysis, noting that, in some cases, distributional effects
may not occur in the markets directly affected by the regulation.
- Measure distributional impacts using a range of assumptions to characterize
the possible distributions of expected impacts.
- Examine distributional impacts over the expected course of market
adjustments because some impacts may be a direct result of markets
adjusting to regulatory requirements and may change over time.
|7 Determining the distribution of impacts involves more than estimating impacts on identified subpopulations. In
particular, ascertaining if disparate impacts exist involves determining if observed differences are statistically
significant. In many cases, however, the data are insufficient to make such a determination.
|8 Although the Agency has not developed
guidance for specifically addressing environmental justice concerns
in its rulemakings, two documents provide overviews of environmental
justice and may be of interest to analysts: Interim Final
Guidance for Incorporating Environmental Justice Concerns in EPAs NEPA
Compliance Analysis ( EPA, 1997h) and Evaluating the Equity
of Environmental Policy Options Based on the Distribution of Economic Effects:
Preliminary Draft ( EPA, 1997g).
|9 Although the Agency has not developed
guidance for addressing impacts on children, analysts are again referred
to Evaluating the Equity of Environmental Policy Options Based on the
Distribution of Economic Effects: Preliminary Draft ( EPA, 1997g)
for an overview of equity considerations based on age.