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WASHINGTON -- HHS launched an Office of Environmental Justice aimed at improving the health of those in underserved areas by focusing on environmental issues.

"The blunt truth is that many communities across our nation -- particularly low-income communities and communities of color -- continue to bear the brunt of pollution from industrial development, poor land use decisions, transportation, and trade corridors," HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra . "Meeting the needs of these communities requires our focused attention. That's why HHS is establishing the ."

The new office will be part of HHS's Office of Climate Change and Health Equity. Its responsibilities will include:

• Leading initiatives to integrate environmental justice into the HHS mission to improve health in disadvantaged communities
• Developing and implementing an HHS-wide strategy on environmental justice and health
• Coordinating annual HHS environmental justice reports
• Promoting training opportunities to build an environmental justice workforce

"Health is closely connected to the environments where people spend the most time -- neighborhoods, workplaces, and outdoor spaces," Admiral Rachel Levine, Assistant Secretary for Health, said in the release. "Millions in the U.S. are at risk of poor health because they live, work, play, learn and grow in or near areas of excessive pollution and other environmental hazards. The Office of Environmental Justice is an important avenue through which their well-being and quality of life are receiving our full attention."

Environmental health advocates were pleased with the announcement. "This office can validate the health damage at the fence lines in exposed communities where knowledgeable people took no responsibility for the well-being of the people who were breathing contaminated air or drinking contaminated water, or being enticed to spend their hard-earned salaries to make their homes on top of buried toxins," Mona Sarfaty, MD, MPH, executive director of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, wrote in an email.

"But we hope it will go farther and bring in staff to work with local residents in these communities to formulate a vision of how to build a greener, healthier, less toxic local neighborhood, and then assist them to move these visions to reality with construction of detoxified and healthy local environments where children, pregnant women, elders, and all people can live safely, breathing clean air and drinking clean water," she continued.

Howard Frumkin, MD, DrPH, former director of the CDC's National Center for Environmental Health and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, also applauded the new office. "It's a core principle of public health that different risks affect different groups," he noted in an email. "Just as government public health efforts focus on childhood diseases (which affect children) and on dementia (which affects elders), it makes sense to target our efforts to control environmental risks. We have loads of evidence that environmental risks ... disproportionately target poor communities and communities of color. In fact, our nation won't achieve health equity until we tackle inequitable environmental risks -- so this office addresses a real, and pressing, problem."

The Environment Protection Agency has had an for many years, added Frumkin, who is also the former dean of the University of Washington School of Public Health. "Environmental justice is as much a health concern as an environmental concern, so it's good to see HHS launching a counterpart initiative."

The new office "can make significant contributions -- helping collect and disseminate data on who's most at risk from environmental exposures, helping track the success of interventions, helping bring the voices of affected communities into the policy process, and helping assure that public health laws are enforced equitably," he added.

Jeni Miller, PhD, executive director of the Global Climate and Health Alliance, said in an email that establishing the new office "is an important step towards achieving health for all in this country by bringing a dedicated focus to the disparate environmental impacts being experienced in different communities."

"Addressing environmental health inequities requires working in collaboration with impacted residents, who have frontline expertise about the conditions they are facing, and must be partners in developing solutions that build community resilience and well-being," she added. "The longstanding harms of environmental justice won't be solved overnight, but the establishment of this office makes me hopeful that we'll see a dedicated and holistic approach to the problem that will begin to drive system-wide solutions."

As one of its first initiatives, the office is seeking public comment on a draft outline of the 2022 HHS Environmental Justice Strategy and Implementation Plan. "The plan will identify priority actions and strategies to best address environmental injustices and health inequities for people of color and disadvantaged, vulnerable, low-income, marginalized, and indigenous populations," according to the press release. The deadline to submit comments on the draft is June 18; more details are in the .

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