Community Air Action Planning - Our Approach

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality is developing  Community Air Action Planning  to drive transformative change through community-led action in areas with vulnerable populations, such as low income and minority communities.

In short, CAAP is an approach for creating change that’s led by communities in collaboration with DEQ to address complex problems. There are many factors that impact a community's air quality that may not be addressed just through current laws. To fill the ‘regulatory gap’ and find opportunities for taking action, CAAP is intended to empower communities and give them a pathway for creating meaningful action in partnership with different types of organizations.

This StoryMap summarizes our approach for how CAAP will spark a process of transformative change that has the potential to address the underlying and connected factors that create the conditions that lead to air pollution. This StoryMap is meant to outline how the CAAP approach will produce positive air quality improvements.  As we gain experience with the approach, this StoryMap will be updated as the CAAP model evolves over time, and we learn from our actions. We invite you to ask questions, tell us what doesn’t make sense and share your input on this new way of trying to improve air quality. Please read the CAAP factsheet for a short explanation of what the program is and how it works.

DEQ has an Air Quality Division that is responsible for restoring, maintaining and enhancing the quality of Oregon’s air. The Air Quality Division largely exists as a ‘regulatory program’. This means that when laws are passed by the federal or state legislatures, it’s DEQ’s responsibility to interpret and implement them.

For example, the federal government passed the   Clean Air Act  , a very large and important piece of legislation that DEQ is tasked with implementing in Oregon. Once a piece of legislation like the Clean Air Act is passed and becomes a bill or law, DEQ begins the implementation process by creating and delivering programs to meet the requirements of the regulation, such as the state’s   air quality permitting program   for large sources of air pollution. A similar, more recent example from the Oregon legislature is the   Cleaner Air Oregon   program which was passed and codified into law in 2018. DEQ subsequently created a team to deliver this program and has been implementing the program ever since. Through the implementation of regulations and development of regulatory programs, DEQ is, by design, reactive and has relatively narrow legal powers to reduce air pollution.

CAAP is intended to enable communities to collaboratively problem-solve in partnership with DEQ, beyond the existing siloed regulatory model of air pollution reduction. To do this, CAAP will, in part, rely upon DEQ’s soft powers.

At its core, CAAP is an attempt to create an avenue for improving air quality in communities with complex air pollution challenges by empowering them directly with knowledge about their air and how air quality can be managed and set up a process that creates opportunities for them to make decisions for themselves about how to address the underlying challenges. The program comes out of DEQ’s recognition that communities need more of a direct say in how environmental challenges that impact their lives should be addressed and that community knowledge has an important role to play in solving air pollution challenges. Additionally, CAAP is a response from wider discussions at DEQ and across Oregon about how environmental justice can be a meaningful lens to shape the work of natural resource agencies and one initiative DEQ is testing to put environmental justice principles into practice. 

Our work through CAAP with communities will begin by identifying and raising awareness of the specific air quality challenges in the community and partnering with residents to engage in a process to address their air pollution problems. Many communities – particularly those that have a high proportion with sensitive residents like children with developing respiratory systems and elderly people and those disproportionately exposed to pollution such as communities of color and low income – face air pollution challenges that are highly complex with no straightforward solutions. For these communities, air pollution may be difficult to address as an isolated, independent challenge so CAAP offers a new entry point for problem-solving by explicitly connecting air pollution with other social and economic activities through the initial ‘visible-izing’ work.

DEQ has designed CAAP to be a program to support these communities – those that are facing an air pollution burden that is not caused by a source that could be addressed through an existing program. In these scenarios, new, carefully planned solutions that are context-specific will be required. In most cases, these solutions will need to be collaborative – initiated and led by the community itself with support from numerous public, private and third sector organizations. At its core, CAAP is a program envisioned and designed to create the conditions for this type of collaborative, collective action that is needed to improve air quality in overburdened and marginalized communities.

Once a community is selected to participate in the CAAP program, the initial focus is examining and understanding air pollution at the community-scale. A local community’s air quality is impacted by a combination of factors ranging from specific sources of air pollutants, meteorological data such as humidity and temperature, wind speed and direction, topography and more. Before determining what actions might be appropriate to improve a specific community’s air quality, it’s necessary to first get a clear picture of what air pollution looks like in the community.

DEQ operates a   statewide network of air monitoring   equipment to ensure all communities across Oregon have air quality that meets the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for six criteria pollutants set by the federal Clean Air Act. Additionally, DEQ has monitoring equipment to measure trends in hazardous air pollutants, or air toxics, around the state to help inform public health decisions. This statewide air monitoring network is excellent at getting a high-level picture of what air pollution looks like around the state for regulatory purposes.

In addition to DEQ’s monitoring network, individual organizations and households have installed low-cost monitoring equipment to gather data about air quality at specific sites such as a home or school. Most of these low-cost air monitors are equipment designed to capture data on fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) like the type of pollution that comes from wildfire smoke. While this data can be compiled into easy to access databases such as   IQAir  , the data that is used for these types of open dashboards cannot be assessed for quality control standards and can often be imprecise.

For each selected community that will go through the CAAP process, DEQ will work with the community to lead ‘community-scale monitoring efforts’ to gather broad data about the area’s potential air pollution exposure. The outcome of each community-scale monitoring effort will culminate in the publication of a ‘Community Air Report’ produced by DEQ that tells a story about the community’s air pollution burden using both quantitative data from monitoring equipment and qualitative data from community knowledge. The Community Air Report will be used to understand the root causes of air pollution challenges and as a catalyst for action during the next stage in the CAAP process (see How is ‘action planning’ defined in our approach?).

The first source of data that will be used for a Community Air Report will come from a network of low-cost air monitoring instruments deployed throughout the community. This equipment has been acquired with support from   an EPA grant  . The instruments used to collect community-scale air data includes PurpleAir monitors (measures PM 2.5), aethalometers (measures ‘black carbon’, sooty material emitted from gasoline and diesel engines, coal-fired powerplants and other sources the burn fossil fuel) and anemometers (measures meteorological data). The Community Air Report will not contain information about some pollutants of concern, such as air toxics, as the project is limited to measurements of PM 2.5 and black carbon. With this monitoring equipment, DEQ will be able to gather broad information about a community’s air pollution.

The second source of data that will be used for developing a Community Air Report will come from what we describe as ‘community knowledge’. People that live, work, go to school and play in a community gain deep understandings about their air in nuanced ways that can’t be captured with air monitoring equipment. Community members might avoid certain areas because of exposure to air pollution or have concerns about something happening in their community that isn’t captured by data from air monitoring equipment. This community knowledge will be gathered through workshops held in each community. While the data will not reflect a representative sampling of the community, it will qualitatively add depth and nuance to what air pollution means within the community, beyond what air monitoring data alone can capture.

DEQ staff will take the data collected from air monitoring equipment and community knowledge and compile it into the Community Air Report. This report will be given to the community and DEQ staff along with CAAP program partners will help the community understand the information captured within the report. Through discussions about the report’s findings, the community and DEQ staff will begin to determine the next steps from using the data gathered through the community-scale monitoring effort and turning that toward action.

The action planning phase of CAAP is determined by the community based on what is learned through the community-scale monitoring effort. The community will examine their Community Air Report and, with support from DEQ and other relevant partners, consider what forms of action might be appropriate to advance their goals and priorities that will be identified during the outset of the community-scale monitoring effort. 

The form that action could take will look different in each community. In certain instances, a community might feel that all of their questions and concerns were answered by the Community Air Report and chose not to pursue additional actions. More likely, the community will want to take proactive steps to address the air quality challenges that will be analyzed and evaluated through the Community Air Report. The range of potential actions is limitless and if additional resources are required to bring forward the community’s desired action, DEQ will do its best to work with the community to find those resources.  

One potential avenue for action the community could identify is additional air quality monitoring or modeling to better understand questions that might emerge through the Community Air Report. Another potential action the community could desire are direct measures like installing air filtration systems in areas where vulnerable people live and spend time. The community might determine creating an outreach and education program to prepare neighbors for extreme air pollution events is the appropriate course of action in like of their Community Air Report. There is not set formula for what the action phase of CAAP could include – each community will be encouraged to carefully consider what set of actions will advance their interests in light of what is learned through the community-scale monitoring effort. 

In some circumstances, the community might determine the best path forward would be establishing a ‘Community Board’ to build momentum for collective action. In this example, diverse ‘actors’ would be brought together under the umbrella of a Community Board to consider the air pollution the community faces and problem-solve as a group, examining what actions each community board member could take that would collectively improve the air quality. These actors – organizations and interest groups like state government agencies, local government authorities, private businesses, community-based organizations, etc. – would be identifiable based upon the results of the Community Air Report produced with the community-scale monitoring data. The result of a Community Board would be producing a ‘Community Air Action Plan’ where all of the actors that participate on the board commit to taking specific actions that should cumulatively help mitigate the impact of the air pollution that affects the community.  

Regardless of what approach a community wants to pursue during its action phase, the action will be emergent and nonlinear. This means the community will be encouraged to have a clear goal for what they want to achieve during the action phase of CAAP but be malleable to adapting their tactics of how to reach that goal as they see what actions work and which don’t. As explored in the ‘Why is CAAP Needed’ section, a community air quality is impact by many different factors meaning there are rarely silver bullet solutions. The action phase of CAAP has, therefore, been designed to mold around the uniqueness of the community rather than asking the community to fit a predetermined process. 

As explored above, many communities are facing highly complex air pollution challenges that are not fully being resolved within the existing toolbox of potential solutions. For these communities, targeted programs – like those existing within DEQ’s current Air Quality Division – simply don’t have the capability to address the underlying systemic conditions that collectively create the air pollution challenges in the first place.

Ultimately, actions sought through CAAP should lead to improved air quality across the given community. Each community will develop its own evaluation of what success will look like as a result of the action planning phase of the CAAP process. While the action planning phase is not linear or straightforward, we have designed it to be open to the complexity of the air pollution challenges facing a community, enabling the CAAP approach to mold around the uniqueness of the community rather than asking the community to fit a predetermined process.

CAAP is a new program DEQ is building. Initially, CAAP is being designed as a pilot program which, if successful, we will try to extend and continue. The pilot phase of CAAP will last three years from July 2023 through June 2026.

During the first year of the pilot, DEQ is working with a group of stakeholders to co-design the CAAP framework which will be published in early 2024. Shortly afterwards, DEQ will begin recruiting communities to partner with during the pilot phase. A total of four communities will be selected for community-level air quality monitoring during the pilot phase. Information about how you can express your interest in having you community be one of the four selected during the pilot phase will be shared in Spring 2024.

You can contact us with questions or comments at   CAAP@deq.oregon.gov .

DEQ does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, disability, age or sex in administration of its programs or activities. ​​

Visit DEQ’s  Civil Rights and Environmental Justice page .​​

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