A climate report card released by the Massachusetts government has left some advocates frustrated with the pace of the state’s work around environmental justice areas.
The report card, released Feb. 13, is the third annual self-assessment released by the state regarding its clean energy and climate goals. The environmental justice section outlines efforts to address injustices and other disparities experienced by communities of color, low-income populations or populations that primarily speak a language other than English as a result of environmental actions taken by local, state or federal governments. It is one of six sections the report tracked.
The other sections looked at the commonwealth’s progress on climate adaptations and resilience, natural and working lands, transportation, buildings and environmental justice. Overall, the state reported mixed results on its climate goals, with higher than expected uptake of heat pumps, for example, but electric vehicle adoption that didn’t measure up to state targets.
For Tristan Thomas, director of policy and law at the Roxbury-based nonprofit Alternatives for Community and Environment, which does environmental justice advocacy, the report card’s environmental justice section failed to inspire confidence.
“The report card is a reflection of the lack of progress that we’re making,” Thomas said, speaking broadly about the findings.
According to the report card, the state saw some growth in the amount of state funds directed to minority-owned businesses or in funding for programs in environmental justice communities. In fiscal year 2025, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, the state’s quasi-public agency focused on climate-related economic development, spent $29 million of its budget for workforce grants. Those grants help provide business training on programs in environmental justice communities, up about $5 million from the year before and up nearly $9 million from the time of the first report in 2023, even as that particular grant’s overall budget dropped during that same period.
Also, according to the new report card, 16.5% of spending through the state’s Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs went to minority-owned businesses, more than twice what was reported in 2023.
But, by other metrics, progress is lagging. For data about how many residents in the state experience financial burdens with energy bills, numbers have remained approximately flat in the three annual reports.
As one of the metrics impacting the day-to-day life of residents, Thomas called it “one of the most important metrics for our community.”
According to the report card, 19.5% of households in Massachusetts pay more than 6% of their income in energy bills. Among residents receiving food assistance (a proxy for low-income residents) the percentage of households paying more than 6% of their income in energy bills rose to 48.9%. Those numbers haven’t varied by more than a couple tenths of a percentage point since the state’s first climate report card.
For other advocates, the state has been doing better than the report card would suggest. John Walkey, director of climate justice at the Chelsea-based environmental justice nonprofit Greenroots, said he thinks
the state shortchanged itself on many of the efforts that the Massachusetts Office of Environmental Justice and Equity has been doing to increase parity in the siting and permitting of energy infrastructure.
He pointed to how the state assesses which sites are suitable for energy infrastructure and how it reaches out to communities to seek input before it moves on such a project. The policy change reflects a shift from what has often happened historically, where energy infrastructure such as power plants have ended up in marginalized and other vulnerable communities.
“All of these things, they’re all a quantum leap for the agencies,” Walkey said.
At the same time, Walkey said he felt “some frustration” regarding the energy burden numbers, but said that some of that is complicated by how those metrics work with how utility companies set up their rates and nebulous fees on electric bills like “energy efficiency” or “social benefits.”
“I think there’s a lack of clarity over how much of your electrical bill is going into the pockets of shareholders of these companies, and how much of this electrical bill is actually going into the maintenance of the system in a sensible way for the public,” Walkey said.
Also complicating this year’s report is a lack of specified goals to be able to measure progress. Other sections of the report include benchmarks, but in the environmental justice section, only one of the five metrics have established benchmarks. Of the other four, three are listed as having targets that are still being developed; for the fifth, concerning public and internal outreach and engagement, the state said there aren’t current targets “at this time.”
Thomas said that to him, the lack of metrics suggests less investment in actually trying to solve the problem.
“If we’re not measuring our success or even defining what success looks like, then we’re not going to see the improvements that we need,” he said.
Walkey said he thinks creating official targets will “remain a challenge,” as any benchmarks try to balance quantitative impacts with the social factors that underlie them.
For example, metrics on air quality can simply use data from air monitors to track what sort of pollutants are in the air. But whether the air quality is an environmental justice concern depends on the communities impacted. Walkey pointed to East Boston, which has historically had and continues to have lower air quality than other neighborhoods but where median home sales have also sharply risen in recent years. “It becomes an environmental concern, a public health concern, but less of an [environmental justice] concern, as lower-income folks are being priced just right out of the neighborhood,” Walkey said.
The targets are also complicated by what the report card does and doesn’t cover. For the most part, it’s focused on work through the state’s executive branch under the Healey-Driscoll administration, but Walkey said a more complete picture needs to consider the legislative branch as well.
“These are things that it takes a team, really, to do,” he said. “It’s like a group project in school.”
For instance, Thomas and Walkey took issue with an energy affordability bill passed by the House of Representatives Feb. 26, which would include a $1 billion cut to Mass Save, a statewide program that aims to connect residents with energy efficiency improvements.
Thomas said the program hasn’t always served environmental justice communities as well as it could have, but he believes recent policy changes to Mass Save offered new opportunities to increase equity. A $1 billion cut to the program would put those improvements at risk, he said.
There are other potential financial cuts that could also impact environmental justice efforts as well. The governor’s budget proposal, filed with the state Jan. 28, proposes that the state’s Office of Environmental Justice and Equity receive just shy of $4.7 million in fiscal year 2027, about $1.5 million less than it received last year and about $3.6 million less than the Healey- Driscoll administration proposed that year.
In the report card, the Healey-Driscoll administration pointed to federal funding cuts as a primary challenge that has impacted the state’s work on its environmental justice goals.
During the Biden administration, organizations could seek more support from the Environmental Protection Agency, but that pot of money has dried up under the Trump administration.
Walkey said funding for environmental justice efforts has “always been a bit of a niche kind of boutique area of work,” where much of the financial support has historically come from philanthropic sources. But, with the “headwinds coming from the federal government, we need to be pushing back against that,” he said.
Thomas said he thinks it’s “unfortunate” that the state is emphasizing federal disinvestment; he sees the budget changes as an indicator of state disinvestment.
“I anticipate that our 2026 report card will look even worse if the state is cutting from its own environmental justice programs,” Thomas said.