Heavy Industry at Critical Juncture for Community Engagement

The industrial sector generates critical materials such as cement, steel, and aluminum and historically has taken a backseat compared to other sectors in the energy transition. Yet, decarbonizing industry is imperative to curb the worst effects of climate change and reach global greenhouse gas reduction targets.  

Fortunately, an influx of federal funding from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is helping overcome previous technical challenges in the development of leading-edge technologies. As project award announcements are made and companies begin breaking ground on demonstrating these technologies, these projects will move from principle to practice and begin to have an impact on the communities where they are sited. Community engagement makes projects better, and the industrial sector needs to ensure that this process is comprehensive and inclusive rather than just cursory.

State of Play 

A flurry of activity at the state and federal level is propelling industrial decarbonization forward. Most recently, the Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) announced their first round of projects that will receive $ 6 billion in federal funding to demonstrate the technical and commercial viability of transformational technologies.  

State agencies are taking advantage of the IRA’s Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) to advance their industrial decarbonization strategies, such as Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s RISE PA solicitation. States are also making commitments to reduce embodied carbon in construction materials. In California, the passage of SB 596 required the state to decarbonize all cement used in California by 2045, in alignment with the state’s mandated climate targets.   

Many of these state and federal programs have made efforts to prioritize community engagement. OCED, for example, has outlined its recommendations for engaging local communities in its Community Benefits Plan guidance for the Industrial Demonstrations Program (IDP). While it is encouraging to see agencies pay special attention to community engagement, it’s important to take a step back and dig into why early and frequent engagement is so vital to industrial decarbonization, particularly within environmental justice (EJ) communities — already on the frontlines of the climate crisis. 

Community Engagement as Part of Environmental Justice  

The 17 Principles of Environmental Justice (1991) and The Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing (1996) are two foundational documents to the environmental justice movement and serve as guides to understanding community engagement and public participation within the larger conversation of climate action. In the context of environmental justice, the role of community engagement is about ensuring meaningful involvement.  
 
Meaningful involvement means that communities can participate in decisions that impact their environment or health; that decision-makers will work alongside those potentially affected; that their input has the power to influence regulatory decisions; and that their concerns will be actively considered and addressed. As a result, both project developers and government agencies must work in collaboration with communities in planning, designing, and implementing projects. Fundamentally, community engagement seeks to achieve procedural justice – otherwise thought of as achieving fairness in decision-making structures. 
 
If communities will be impacted by industrial decarbonization projects involving large-scale, complex technology, they must be equipped with adequate information regarding, among many elements, how the technologies work, and how they may affect those living near it. Beyond educational purposes, this information must be shared so communities can make informed decisions. Through this, communities can transition to positions of collaboration and co-ownership, and have self-determination over project developments. 
 
Communities hold the complex social, political, and economic histories of where they live, and no one knows the priorities, experiences, and environment of a community better than those within it. Therefore, developers and government agencies can only get to know the impacted people and region by engaging with them directly, and through that, they can learn firsthand the power and role of community expertise.

Lessons Learned from Large-Scale Renewable Energy Deployment 

Large-scale renewable energy projects have taught us how incredibly valuable and necessary community input is to project development. A 2022 study examined the sources of community opposition to renewable energy projects in the U.S. and identified 53 utility-scale wind, and solar projects that were delayed or blocked between 2008 and 2021 across 28 states. The researchers identified seven sources of opposition, including public perceptions of unfair participation processes or inadequate inclusion considering regulatory requirements, and concluded that early and meaningful engagement with impacted groups can help overcome opposition and project delays or cancellations. 
 
Beyond creating and ensuring processes of community engagement, tangibly integrating community voices into project implementation is vital. Research has found that acceptance of energy projects “is [partially] determined by the means proponents use to engage with communities. Examples include integration of meetings into communities’ daily routines and the inclusion of local knowledge and communities’ priorities, needs, cultures, ways of life, and physical environments into energy plans rather than merely using knowledge from experts and consultants to predesign energy projects (Romero-Lankao et al. 2023).” Put simply: community engagement, expertise, and support each make projects better for the climate and people.  

New Technologies Embracing Community Engagement is Critical

Entities scaling innovative industrial decarbonization technologies can reflect and apply the lessons learned from the deployment of large-scale renewables. In embracing community expertise and local knowledge, it is important for any entity to do their due diligence in effectively identifying which communities are directly and indirectly impacted by a proposed project. There’s no "one-size-fits all” approach to identifying who represents a community, but there are steps and norms to assessing an effective path forward. 

To begin with, project developers and government agencies alike should be responsible for outlining expected impacts of projects over their lifecycle, identifying which communities may be affected by them, and making such data publicly available as early as possible. Therefore, these entities should also disclose, at minimum, the local health and environmental impacts, relevant pollution monitoring tools that will be used throughout the project’s lifecycle, and the methods that will be used to mitigate any identified impacts. Subsequently, robust, inclusive stakeholder outreach and collaboration with the identified communities must occur in all phases of a project, including the design, planning, and implementation.  

It is imperative that developers engage early, frequently, and consistently with communities. Doing so can establish durable working relationships and is essential to identifying local benefits. Even then, trust cannot be rushed nor is it owed to developers by communities.

Takeaways

For a true and just decarbonized energy future, industrial decarbonization technologies must not exacerbate or create undue burden onto environmental justice communities. They must ensure localized community-identified benefits and address legacy pollution. Community engagement is the critical first step to embedding environmental justice principles into industrial decarbonization, but it is not the end of the conversation. Community engagement is one part of a larger story to achieving procedural, distributive and reparative justice with environmental justice communities.  

Disclaimer: The ideas represented in this blog post solely highlight the intersection of community engagement and industrial decarbonization levers and are not a substitute for robust community engagement. The authors encourage readers to engage with their local community groups and environmental justice partners to explore real-world applications of community engagement principles and values.