Dive Brief:
- The Environmental Protection Agency has selected 84 more local climate and environmental justice projects to receive awards from its Community Change grants program, the agency announced Thursday.
- These grants build on awards announced for 21 applicants under the Community Change grants program in July, bringing the total amount of funding awarded through the program up to nearly $1.6 billion.
- As the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump approaches on Jan. 20, the Biden administration is hurrying to get climate funds out the door, according to The Hill. The EPA says it’s on track to obligate most selected Community Change grants by January 2025.
Dive Insight:
Much of the last four years has been regularly punctuated with local climate funding announcements from the Biden administration, but that will soon come to an end. President-elect Donald Trump has said he wants to rescind all unspent money from the Inflation Reduction Act, which funds the Community Change grants program and numerous other climate funding programs.
November marked the final application deadline for the Community Change program, which received around 2,700 applications requesting a total of over $40 billion. The EPA said in a news release that it still has an “overwhelming” number of applications to review but limited funds remaining. The Biden administration has previously said it expects to award a total of nearly $2 billion under the program, which suggests the EPA has roughly $400 million more in funding to award.
The large number of remaining applications to review means EPA’s evaluations will need to continue into the Trump administration, the agency said. “To ensure all applications are given fair consideration, EPA will not make any additional selections until all these applications are evaluated according to the processes described in the Notice of Funding Opportunity issued in November 2023,” the EPA said. The EPA is expected to get a new administrator next year pending Senate confirmation; Trump has picked former Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., to lead the agency.
The work funded by the Community Change program is wide-ranging, even within the scope of a single application. For example, the city of New Haven, Connecticut, won a grant that will help it establish 5,000 feet of “climate resilience corridors” to be outfitted with greenways and green infrastructure like permeable pavement and engineered tree pits that capture stormwater. New Haven’s effort will also expand bike-share and community-based composting programs, help multifamily building owners improve energy efficiency and support hundreds of comprehensive building energy assessments.
