The Upstream Evidence Project
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Auditing CalEnviroScreen

In short

We published a research report auditing California's climate finance algorithm guiding billions of dollars to environmentally disadvantaged communities. We found the tool to be flawed, and recommended that communities should have more of a say as to how it's developed. We built explainer tools, worked with community organizations, and briefed state agencies to improve community algorithmic co-development.

What we did

We used publicly available data to fully reproduce and audit CalEnviroScreen, finding key flaws and enabling communities to perform their own audits.

What we found

Small, plausible changes to the model can shift billions of dollars in funding. It's important to have a model that communities can agree on, given what's at stake.

What changed

After publishing our results, we worked with journalists, community organizations, and briefed relevant local agencies as part of a policy campaign for procedural justice: communities should be more actively included in the model development process. The new draft of CalEnviroScreen incorporated direct participation from community based organizations and set out a roadmap for community co-development of the model. We built an audit and visualizer tool, which lets community organizations explore the draft model and shape what comes next. More than 60 organizations have used it to prepare their own comments and analyses.

What we filed

Sources

Coverage

Huynh BQ*, Chin ET*, Koenecke A, Ouyang D, Ho DE, Kiang MV, Rehkopf DH. Mitigating allocative tradeoffs and harms in an environmental justice data tool. Nature Machine Intelligence 6:187–194, 2024. doi:10.1038/s42256-024-00793-y (*co-first author)