# Plain Language Summary: Protection from Cumulative Emissions and Underenforcement of Environmental Law Act of 2021

This bill asks the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to tackle a serious problem: some communities face multiple environmental hazards all at once, and these combined dangers aren't being properly addressed. The bill focuses on communities that are already dealing with pollution, poverty, or other challenges, and it requires the EPA to develop a comprehensive plan to understand and reduce the health risks these communities face from stacked environmental problems.

The first major part of the bill requires the EPA to create a protocol—essentially a detailed guideline—for assessing how multiple environmental stressors affect people's health. These stressors include pollution from factories and cars, contaminated drinking water, toxic chemicals, climate-related disasters like flooding and extreme heat, and other environmental hazards. The EPA has 180 days to propose this protocol and must hold at least four public hearings in different locations to get input from affected communities. After gathering feedback, the EPA has one year to finalize the plan and three years to start using it. This means communities will eventually have a systematic way to understand how all their environmental problems combine to affect their health, rather than each problem being studied in isolation.

The second major part targets communities that have been repeatedly ignored when it comes to environmental law enforcement. The EPA must identify at least 100 communities—particularly those with significant populations of people of color, low-income residents, or Native Americans—that have experienced more environmental violations than the national average over the past five years. For each of these communities, the EPA must figure out why violations keep happening, talk to residents about their experiences, and then implement solutions to bring violations down significantly below the national average within two years. This addresses a real-world problem where some neighborhoods consistently have more polluters operating with fewer consequences than other areas.

Protection from Cumulative Emissions and Underenforcement of Environmental Law Act of 2021

DeGette, Diana

Protection from Cumulative Emissions and Underenforcement of Environmental Law Act of 2021 This bill directs the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to address the cumulative public health risks associated with multiple environmental stressors and recommend measures to reduce the number of violations of environmental law in certain environmental justice communities. Environmental justice communities are communities with significant representation of communities of color, low-income communities, or tribal and indigenous communities that experience, or are at risk of experiencing, higher or more adverse human health or environmental effects, as compared to other communities. In addition, the EPA must publish and implement a proposal for a protocol that assesses and addresses the cumulative public health risks associated with multiple environmental stressors, such as impacts associated with global climate change. Further, the EPA must identify at least 100 communities that (1) are environmental justice communities; and (2) have had more environmental law violations than the national average, as determined by the EPA. The EPA must then identify the causes of the violations, identify measures to reduce the number of violations, and implement such measures.