The Arizona Capitol Building. January 2017
More than 35 conservation groups including the Sierra Club, Arizona Youth Climate Coalition, Arizona Asian American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders for Equity, Chispa Arizona, presented their 2025 Environmental Priorities to the Arizona Legislature and Governor Katie Hobbs in Phoenix yesterday.
The coalition is calling for urgent action on the climate crisis, advocating for clean affordable energy, sustainable water policies to protect groundwater and rivers, improved public health, measures to address environmental injustices and expanded access to democratic processes.
Sandy Bahr, director of the Grand Canyon Chapter of the Sierra Club, said the group is asking legislators to hold the line against weakening protections for water, public health, lands and more.
“To limit the depletion of precious water resources especially in rural Arizona, where people are seeing their wells dry up, land subsidence, huge cracks occur in their homes and yet we have had a legislature that has taken no action on that,” Bahr said.
The groups are urging lawmakers to act this legislative session.
“It is time for a change, it is time to invest in renewable energy,” said Rep. Oscar De Los Santos (D-Laveen).
Senator Priya Sundareshan (D-LD 18) called on Republican colleagues to support proposed bills.
“We must protect these resources if we have any hope of being able to continue to live in Arizona into the future,” Sundareshan said.
“Wanting cleaner air and heat mitigation efforts is for everyone,” said Vania Guevara, advocacy and political director for Chispa Arizona.
The priorities include:
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Urging the Arizona Legislature to support the Governor’s Office of Resiliency in developing a climate action plan, repealing laws that restrict local climate action, investing in transportation electrification and energy efficiency with a focus on underserved communities, directing state agencies to collaborate on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and rejecting legislation that hinders clean energy or pollution-free transportation.
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Prioritizing water conservation by enacting laws to regulate statewide groundwater pumping, addressing harmful agricultural and development practices, promoting water reclamation and wastewater treatment, protecting ecological flows in rivers and streams including ephemeral waters in surface water quality programs and funding efforts to restore impaired waters and meet water quality standards.
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Adopting an environmental justice framework similar to the federal Justice40 Initiative, ensuring 40% of benefits from key investments reach underserved communities, requiring state agencies to implement environmental justice policies, defining “overburdened communities,” requiring polluters to submit detailed environmental justice impact statements and empowering the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality to mitigate or deny permits based on disproportionate impacts.
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Protecting public lands, restoring tribal homelands, establishing a state-level endangered species program, creating an environmental policy act to assess and mitigate government actions’ environmental impacts with public and tribal input and funding wildlife corridors in collaboration with federal agencies.
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Enacting automatic voter registration, expanding early voting, restoring voting rights for formerly incarcerated individuals, protecting direct democracy by easing ballot measure processes and safeguarding the First Amendment right to protest, particularly for communities of color.
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