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When the White House recently released its third National Climate Assessment, the basic findings didn’t surprise anyone who’s stepped outside on a regular basis. The Southwest portion of the U.S., including California, has been decreed in the report as “the hottest and driest region.” What isn’t so obvious, of course, is exactly what the future will bring. But the outlook is not positive.

Ironically, as officials grapple with storage and shortage issues, they also have to deal with flooding. As Robyn DiFalco, executive director of the Butte Environmental Council, explains, shifts in precipitation patterns throughout the country, but even in California, can mean more intense rain and snow in places not accustomed to such levels, and warmer winters mean greater—and earlier—ice melts in California mountain areas.

Water may be a prime concern, but it’s not the only concern. BEC has a three-pronged approach to environmental advocacy: land, air and water, and the interrelationship between the three. As explained by Chico City Councilwoman Tami Ritter, a member of the county’s Air Quality Management District, dry land breeds a greater risk of wildfires, which breeds greater air pollution. As a result, DiFalco says her organization is pushing all three elements as Chico and Butte County implement climate action plans, and the recent reports haven’t shifted BEC’s priorities.

In spots around Butte County, particularly in south Chico and south Oroville, ecological hazards threaten health and safety. Some residents know; some don’t. Polluters tend not to advertise when they’re breaking the law, and residual toxins from decades past represent some of the biggest risks.

According to Robyn DiFalco, executive director of the Butte Environmental Council, “a clean and healthy environment versus dirty, unhealthy, polluted environments really have a lot connected with geography.” Wealthy neighborhoods don’t have to deal with these problems because residents there tend to “squawk very loud if dirty industrial sites were in their backyard—and they would prevent them from going in, and choose not to live near those sites.” Lower-income individuals don’t always “have those opportunities to speak out and prevent those sites from going in,” she continued, and neighborhoods with less expensive housing often are located “near these sites that are visually less attractive and have these health problems that their families may be affected by. “So, to be able to see a geographic dispersion of contamination sites, environmental and public health issues, is very telling,” DiFalco continued. “That’s why it’s so important to give visibility to that—that’s why it’s so important to have the EJSCREEN tool and the one that California does … otherwise, a lot of these communities are out of sight, out of mind.”