(New York, NY, Tuesday, June 22, 2021) – For Black communities still reckoning with the tragedies of COVID-19 and often hit first and the hardest by climate change, June could present an environmental challenge.

June is a month filled with community celebrations from Black Music Month to graduations, Father’s Day, LGBTQIA+ Pride celebrations, and Juneteenth. But it is also a foreboding month as it is the start of summer extreme weather. Climate change is fueling more frequent and intense superstorms and hurricanes, record heatwaves, excessive flooding, and massive wildfires. These weather events disproportionately impact black communities.

Environmental Defense Fund, a leading environmental organization focused on stabilizing the climate, sees an encouraging pathway for solving such challenges in the American Jobs Plan.

The Biden Administration plan seeks to boost our nation’s COVID-ravaged economy by creating good-paying jobs, as well as setting an ambitious climate and health agenda with environmental justice as a priority. The plan includes:

• A just transition to clean energy. Black, brown, and low-income communities are exposed to higher levels of air pollution, so a cleaner environment would reduce negative health impacts and increase resiliency to climate change.
• Increased economic opportunity. More electric vehicles and a clean energy transition will create thousands of good-paying jobs.
• Infrastructure upgrades. Improving outdated infrastructure will promote healthier, cleaner, more functional communities (e.g. systems that remove toxins from drinking water).

The plan offers what EDF embraces and strongly supports fair and just investments in our people by rebuilding cleaner and healthier communities; reducing pollution through a transition to clean energy; and making communities more resilient to climate change.