What is a frontline community?

February 11, 2021

By Gabrielle Gundry

While observing the impacts of climate change, society must look at where those effects are being felt. Just as climate change impacts ecosystems differently, communities experience varying impacts of climate change. Frontline communities are those that experience the most immediate and worst impacts of climate change and are most often communities of color, Indigenous, and low-income (Ecotrust Frontline Communities). Looking at how and why these communities are increasingly vulnerable in their risk against climate change and the pollution exploitations imposed on them from society (Ecotrust Frontline Communities) is important in the greater context of how to ensure environmental justice in climate change management infrastructure.

Exploitation and pollution

Oil and gas extraction.

One of the main environmental impacts felt by frontline communities is the disproportionate impacts of pollution of toxins (EPA). Indigenous communities that reside in areas with high potential for oil and gas development have historically been exploited, and their communities polluted with detrimental health effects (UCLA Oil and Gas in Indigenous Communities). Apart from the air pollution that results from burning fossil fuels, the methods used to extract oil and gas are equally harmful to the surrounding communities. Oil and gas industries sometimes use hydraulic fracking to extract resources; fracking uses pressurized liquids to crack bedrock to get to the oil and gas far beneath the surface (American Rivers). A risk of fracking is the contamination of clean water sources with chemicals that can lead to birth defects and cancer in many instances (The Wilderness Society). Furthermore, the emissions resulting from burning oil and gas are contributing to climate change (The Wilderness Society), of which low-income communities and communities of color are more vulnerable, experiencing greater damage from natural disasters, a higher rate of heat-related deaths, and less infrastructure to prevent climate change damage and recover from its effects (NRDC).

An unequal policy infrastructure

Frontline communities are often left out of legislative processes that develop environmental and climate change policies (NRDC), with minimal voice and hence minimal say in how these communities are impacted by America’s dominant corporate industries that benefit from resource extraction. Prior government administrations focused on policy frameworks that did not consider economic, racial, and environmental justice which could contribute to ensuring equally resilient communities in the face of climate change (NRDC). Recognizing the connection between environmental justice and climate change effects is a crucial step in facilitating a framework that addresses climate change within all communities, and furthermore in reducing the systemic racism that exists in our current policy framework that supports market-based exploitation (NRDC). 

As climate change effects worsen across the globe and in the United States, communities are being impacted at different rates and capacities. Frontline communities are disproportionately exposed to pollution and toxins that affect human health and are left out of the legislative processes that develop environmental and climate change policies (NRDC). While frontline communities continue to feel the effects of climate change socially, scientifically, and economically, a shared vision of a future in which policy infrastructure addresses and works to remediate environmental injustice, and in which all communities have an equal voice in developing policies that affect our local, national, and global environment is in sight.

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