After the 2018 Camp Fire tore through Paradise and neighboring areas, claiming at least 85 lives and displacing 50,000 people, some older residents from that region relocated to Carson City, Nev., and nearby locations.

Months later, Dr. Elizabeth Haase, medical director of psychiatry at Carson Tahoe Hospital and Behavioral Health Services and a founding member of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance — a group of mental health professionals raising awareness of the effects of climate change on mental health — said she observed worsening health, including exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and rapid progression of dementia in some of the older people who had relocated from the Camp Fire zone.

“People can have a very dramatic decrease in their overall mental and physical health that’s connected to one of these climate events — that is likely to get missed, in terms of the association,” Haase said. One of her older patients developed pneumonia in addition to worsening of her chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and was hospitalized for several months, she said. Her patient’s mental health also deteriorated.

“In offering her the understanding — because I’m somebody that knows about climate and health — that what was happening to her now is linked to her experience in the fire was actually quite therapeutic for her,” she said. “And you know, a lot of sort of depressive and grief-related symptoms came out. And we were able to talk a little bit about what it means to be in your 70s and lose your home with absolutely no possibility, financially, of rebuilding.”

Like Haase, mental health experts based in the San Francisco Bay Area are exploring the ensuing physical, mental and emotional effects of climate change. Dr. Robin Cooper is co-founder and president of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, and an associate clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. She also has a small private practice in the city.

Cooper spoke with the San Francisco Public Press about what needs to be done locally to address climate change’s mental health toll. The following excerpts from the interview have been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve been working as a psychiatrist for decades, and in recent years, you’ve been exploring the threats of climate change to mental health. What got you interested in this field?

I have always been, outside of my professional endeavors, an activist. At the time that I began to learn about and think about and be introduced to the issues of climate change, it had that — “Wake up! Oh my God, this is a potential existential threat.” Once knowing about something that profound, I can’t turn myself away from it. And I began to be active in a number of organizations that were addressing climate change in its broader sense. But as I began to discover, I could use my voice most effectively in the realm that’s close to my work. So, I began to be involved much more in the health impacts of climate change.

A lot was being said about the general broad range of health impacts, but at the end of a talk, a pulmonologist or cardiologist or infectious disease person would say, “Oh, by the way, there’s some mental health impacts.” And I was shocked. I said, “Oh my God, we should be talking about that. We need to be the experts on that.” I met other likeminded psychiatrists, but our voice was very, very tiny at that time. And we came together with the idea that this was something we needed to take ownership of, know more about and be able to speak to it.

Could you describe how climate change affects the mental health of older adults?

So, you and I are both Californians, we know about the Paradise fire. Paradise was a community that had a large number of retirees. It was affordable. It was a place where people could go after years of living in other communities, buy a home that was going to be their place of retirement and live up the rest of their lives. The massive loss of their homes, their community, the place that they could live. These are people who retired, they’re on fixed incomes, who lost everything. So, when you lose your home, and you don’t have a lot of economic resources for rebuilding, you really have secondary emotional impacts. And so, where do you live? The loss of your social support — the greater level of poverty that you live out the rest of your life — interferes with the ability to make choices. And that has huge emotional impacts with depression, post-traumatic stress and a greater vulnerability.

If we look at the disasters that happened in Puerto Rico [in 2017 following Hurricanes Irma and Maria], particularly, the elderly were left on their own. They had no access to medications. Young people had gone to the U.S. mainland for jobs. So, the elderly were left on their own with little to help them recover. And those have huge implications for their emotional wellbeing and their physical wellbeing.

As extreme weather events continue to increase, what should local governments, hospitals, nonprofits and other organizations that are providing services to older people be doing now to strengthen the mental health infrastructure?

We’re in a big crisis, as you know, in health care delivery. We need to make changes in our health care delivery as we confront the vast kinds of troubles that people are going to experience from climate change. And that means shifting to funding and providing care in a more public health, community health manner using population-based ways of intervening. It means that the governmental agencies and those who pay for health care have to do that in a different way.

It also means empowering people in communities to do that before there are extreme heat waves and disasters. It means tightening up our neighbor-to-neighbor relationships, particularly for the elderly. That’s incredibly important, because they can be isolated, left alone, not able to care for themselves. If we have a public health model, and a model based on connectivity in communities, we can have partnerships. We can have buddy systems so Joe knows that Mrs. Smith, who is 86 years old and in her home, is alone and knows what she needs, and has someone to bring her to cooling centers, or help modulate continuing her medications as these disasters and climate events emerge.

Let me just give you another little example. Hurricane Sandy hit New York and the Eastern seaboard with ferocious impacts. Elderly people in this particular public housing that I’m aware of were stuck in their apartments for days without food, light or ability to get out because of the elevators not working. And then people came to the door. And they didn’t know if they were safe. They didn’t know if those were intruders who were going to hurt them, or people there to help them. It doesn’t have to be that way if we take care of some of these things before.

UCSF launched a climate change and mental health task force in June 2019. What did the group set out to do and what has it accomplished, especially for older people?

I would say our achievements have been in the realm of educating mental health trainees about the impacts of climate change in mental health. I believe that medical students need to be what we call climate literate in their educational endeavors. How can we train doctors, and anyone in health care, adequately, if we don’t train them to think about the most significant threat to our wellbeing of this century?

That task force is now being integrated more into this campuswide center on climate health and equity, which actually is a UC-wide endeavor that the Office of the President has supported that is multi-campus, although it’s primarily based at UCSF. I will say it is profoundly underfinanced.

Are you aware of other projects like that in the Bay Area?

There are things happening at many institutions, not with creating a task force, but other kinds of things. Stanford has a new faculty position for one person in the Department of Psychiatry to embed climate change and mental health into their department. Davis has a number of people who are exploring and doing research. But I will say to you, all of these things are siloed. Coming together is a really big issue in the realm of climate and mental health.

The surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, last month sounded the alarm about the loneliness epidemic in the U.S., and how social isolation has a detrimental effect on the health of older people. And climate disasters could worsen this disconnection, especially if older adults are displaced from their homes and communities. So, on a local level, what steps can be taken to alleviate the loneliness crisis?

I think it is enhancing recreational, social meal programs that bring people outside of their homes and engage them with each other in socially involved activities. We know that caregivers are so underpaid, and that there’s been a massive loss in numbers of people who are doing caregiving for the elderly, because you can’t make a living off of it. We have to fund caregivers, so that those who are isolated in their homes have regular connection.

Given all the challenges and complexities of investigating and implementing solutions to address climate change’s toll on mental health, what gives you hope for the future?

Hope is a funny word. Hope is not optimism. Hope is not like, “I can see our way out of this.” We are going to have very, very significant, enduring, unrepairable damage from the impact of climate change. What gives me hope is this new way of defining hope — radical hope. I can envision a better world to live in. And when I see what’s happening, I can’t turn away from it, I have to lean into it. And some people are saying now, hope is a verb we create out of the activism that we do to confront our wicked problem. And what we do now is not going to make this all nice and better, but it will affect the kind of world that we’re moving toward in the future.

This Q&A, part of a series of stories on the health impacts of climate change on older adults, was produced with the support of a journalism fellowship from the Gerontological Society of America, the Journalists Network on Generations and the Archstone Foundation.

See also:

• “Research on Climate Change and Health Reveals Risks for Older Adults: A Q&A With Dr. Andrew Chang,” 1/27/2023
• “Battling Despair Over a New Climate Change Reality,” 9/14/2021

The post Climate Change Can Harm Mental Health of Older Adults appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Against this backdrop and with extreme weather events on the rise, physician-researchers like Dr. Andrew Chang, an attending physician specializing in cardiology at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System and postdoctoral research fellow at the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, are investigating how the biological mechanisms of aging and a warming world will affect the health of older adults.

In 2022, Chang and his colleagues examined medical literature to study the intricate and nuanced ways that climate change-fueled disasters and other environmental factors influence the cardiovascular health of older people. They summarized their findings in the journal Current Cardiology Reports. In an interview with the San Francisco Public Press, Chang shared some of the concerns expressed by older patients during environmental disasters like wildfires, and explained the challenges researchers often face while gathering data on this subject.

Below are excerpts from the interview, which have been edited for length and clarity.

What was the motivation for you and your colleagues to embark on researching the health impacts of climate change specifically on older adults?

In the immediate phase, the group of people who most suffers from the effects of climate change are our older adults and some of our senior citizens, and the reason for that is sort of twofold. First is, there are pretty unique biological changes that happen to the human body with aging, which actually increase the susceptibility to environmental factors. And the second thing is, there are social factors as well which make older adults less resilient against some of these events. So not surprisingly, if you look at the casualty rates from both natural disasters, as well as long-term exposures to things like air pollution, disproportionately, it is older adults who are dying from some of these conditions or developing conditions or suffering from the effects of these things. I think, very quickly, it became clear to us that the study of climate change’s effects on human health disproportionately involves the health of our older adults.

Wildfires are an ongoing concern here in the Bay Area as well as across the state. And your article explored the relationships between climate change and wildfires and cardiovascular risk for older people. Could you explain how they are linked?

The biggest thing is that older adults don’t have the same barrier functions that younger adults and younger people do. And what I mean by that is that most of the injury that happens from wildfire smoke is from inhalation. So, you breathe in particles, and particulate matter we know is highly inflammatory, and it enters your body. It enters the circulation through the tiny blood vessels called capillaries that are inside of your lungs. Older adults don’t have barrier functions at those blood vessels that are as robust as younger adults. So, you kind of have more of a leaky effect, where more of those toxins are absorbed. And then they enter into the bloodstream. 

Now, not only are more toxins coming in, there’s underlying susceptibility. There’s just the normal process of aging that causes us to have reduced lung capacity. If you imagine that we’re already starting out with reduced lung capacity as an older adult, then losing even more of that is more dangerous. Similarly, just due to normal aging processes, the heart muscle becomes stiffer, the arteries are less elastic. So, any of these toxic effects basically become magnified. 

And then on top of all of that, of course, older adults are more likely to have preexisting cardiopulmonary diseases — things like heart failure or high blood pressure or diabetes — and all of those things work additively or multiplicatively in terms of your injury from air pollution exposure.

Were there any other particularly startling or surprising findings that you came across as you were doing this research?

I was really surprised how so many of the deaths that are attributable to heat waves or heat events were actually cardiac rather than things coded as heat stroke or heat exhaustion. Because, I guess in my head, it had seemed that the actual exposure to the heat itself was probably going to be the biggest determinant of injury. As a clinical cardiologist, it kind of reinforced to me that heat-related injury for older adults is a cardiac problem.

Were there any challenges that you and your team experienced as you were working on this paper? Did you run into any hurdles in finding data about how climate change will affect the elderly population?

The paper that you’re referencing is … our synthesis of what the entirety of the literature looks like. In terms of data, our group also does a lot of primary research using primary sources of data. In general, in those situations, there are some challenges. One of them is that a lot of exposures tend to be gradual, over long periods of time. Things like air pollution, for example, we know climate change makes air pollution worse. But everyone experiences some amount of air pollution at baseline. So, there’s a challenge of studying something that’s sort of insidious, and occurring over a long period of time, in terms of things like air pollution. 

On the flip side, studying things like wildfires or extreme heat events, which are very intense, very short exposures. Part of that is also challenging because it’s hard to gather data in the moment. When there is a natural disaster, say like a wildfire, the priority on the ground really is to evacuate people. It’s to make sure that they’re being safe, that they’re being cared for. And a lot of research ends up happening retrospectively, trying to kind of go back and cobble together what exactly happened. So, you start to lose some of that individual granularity. 

You can gather much more granular data. For example, some of my colleagues are putting air sensors in people’s homes and looking forward to future wildfire seasons to see how much does that impact their health outcomes. The challenge on that side is also that’s very granular data that tends to be kind of hard and expensive to do on a large scale. 

And are you currently doing any research?

I’ll speak more generally, just because these studies are ongoing. But some of the questions that we’re interested in generally are: What were the effects of specific wildfire seasons on emergency room visits? Did emergency room visits for certain types of conditions — say, asthma attacks, heart attacks, strokes — change before and after specific wildfire events? 

Other things we’re looking at are things like subclinical markers. What I mean by subclinical markers is: Is there an early detection system for injuries to the organs from these insidious, prolonged exposures? To give you an example, I look at ultrasound data of the heart in older adults — people over 65 — to look at over the course of five years or so of air pollution exposure. Are there subtle findings like subtle changes that happen to the way the heart moves? The way the heart muscle moves that may mean worse things are down the line? Can we identify these things early on? Can we identify people who are at risk for worse things like heart failure down the line from air pollution exposure? So that’s another thing that I’m interested in. 

In your clinical practice here in the Bay Area, do conversations about climate change come up with your older patients who have cardiovascular diseases?

The climate change issue that I field the most questions about are usually during wildfire seasons. I think part of that has to do with the visibility of it. When it looks like “Blade Runner” outside, the skies look pretty apocalyptic. I think it’s pretty clear to everybody: If you’ve ever tried to go jogging during a bad air quality day, it’s quite apparent that your heart and lungs are not happy with what’s going on. And I have to say most of our patients are also aware of that. I think that’s less of a thought during the extreme heat, because most people don’t immediately connect extreme heat events with heart disease, but I will definitely say I get a lot of questions from patients during wildfire season asking: What does this mean for me? What are the dangers to me? And most importantly, what should I do?

How can healthcare professionals help older people understand the risks of climate change?

We do know that unfortunately, older adults are less mobile and less able to evacuate in times of climate crises. I think one of the saddest statistics I’ve ever heard is that during Hurricane Katrina, over half of the people who died were over the age of 75. That really speaks to the fact that emergency planning has to be done in advance for older adults.  

I know a few of the environmental agencies do in general recommend that people at higher risk for harm from these situations have a disaster response plan. And having these types of disaster management plans is something that we can and should be talking about with our patients, particularly those who live in parts of the country with seasonal emergencies like hurricanes or wildfires or extreme heat waves. I think, as of now, that’s probably something that we as clinicians should be talking about with our older and vulnerable patients that we probably aren’t doing.

While older adults overall are vulnerable to climate change threats, your paper mentioned how those experiencing poverty and structural racism are at greater risk. Could you say more about this?

People who are at a lower socioeconomic status are almost always at higher risk. Part of that has to do with the fact that a lot of current solutions that have to deal with these things involve money, things like air conditioning for heat, and the fact that people who have money and means are more likely to afford higher quality care, so they are less likely to have developed some of these risk factors even if they are the same age as somebody who may be poor. 

In terms of racial, ethnic breakdowns, we’re increasingly recognizing that certain policies, for example, redlining, have marginalized certain groups of people such as African Americans to unfortunately live in parts of cities and communities that may be exposed to higher rates of air pollution — for example, near highways or industrial areas. And as you can imagine, having a higher baseline underlying rate of air pollution exposure means you’re more likely to be injured when there’s a spike in it from something like a wildfire. 

Anything else you wish to add?

I think, moving forward, we shouldn’t take a paternalistic attitude. There are a lot of things that older adults can also offer in the fight against both climate change and climate change-mediated disasters. There’s a certain resilience that you gain from life experiences. 

Also, older adults, a lot of them have this transgenerational thinking, this ability to imagine and advocate for a world for future generations — for their children, for their grandchildren, for their great grandchildren. That, I think, is really powerful. And in many societies, like First Nations societies, elders are quite respected and are important decision makers. Anything that we do in terms of policy, we need to make sure that older adults are equal partners in the decision making, and that we try to leverage their specialized skill sets or their strengths or their worldviews in order to craft our responses to these things, because we’d be surprised at a lot of the strength and resilience that we’ll find from our elders.

This Q&A, the first in a series of stories on the health impacts of climate change on older adults, was produced with the support of a journalism fellowship from the Gerontological Society of America, the Journalists Network on Generations and the Archstone Foundation.

The post Research on Climate Change and Health Reveals Risks for Older Adults: A Q&A With Dr. Andrew Chang appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

To a degree, they have succeeded. A constant stream of policy papers, letters to state agencies and lawsuits preceded exemptions from state greenhouse gas restrictions potentially worth millions of dollars.

Officials at the California Air Resources Board say they have listened carefully to business concerns since they began drafting the complex rules governing the cap-and-trade program in 2009. But some critics say that allowing industry to influence the regulations after the program started could itself cause economic volatility.

The transportation fuels industry won a two-year delay in its participation in cap-and-trade. In 2010 companies and industry associations argued that entering the program by 2012 would hurt the economy and penalize consumers.

A panel of experts in 2007 recommended transportation fuels be included on schedule to “encourage owners of conventional fuel cars to make more socially efficient decisions as to how much to drive.”

Ultimately, though, regulators approved the delay, citing the lack of accurate pollution data from transportation fuels producers. Compliance is set to begin in 2015, just five years before the program’s reduction targets are supposed to be met.

Jet fuel comprises 3 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But airlines argued that they should not be covered under California cap-and-trade, writing in 2010 that federal aviation laws precluded states from regulating aircraft fuel. The Air Resources Board never brought the airline industry into the program.

Now the trucking industry is reviving arguments that challenge the regulations head-on. In a lawsuit filed against the state in April, the industry asks to invalidate the entire cap-and-trade system, alleging it was a tax passed improperly without the required two-thirds vote in the Legislature.

Many industries are motivated to avoid participating in cap-and-trade. From an estimated $2 billion this year, California’s carbon market is forecast to grow to $10 billion by 2016, according to Point Carbon, a division of Thomson Reuters. The transportation sector’s greenhouse gas emissions are 38 percent of the total.

Some analysts predict the price of an “allowance” to pollute could soar to $70 per metric ton of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas equivalent by next decade.

Mary D. Nichols, chair of the Air Resources Board, said her staff pays attention to business concerns because they realize that a poorly planned carbon-trading scheme could wreak havoc in the state’s still struggling economy. The agency has enormous leeway to change the rules as the program rolls out.

“We are now looking at some further amendments to the program, further refinements,” Nichols said. “We want to make sure we are being sensitive to any possible run-up in prices of allowances.”

While pushback on regulation abounds, “our greatest challenge is the transportation sector,” she said.

The cap-and-trade program, a key piece of the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, limits total carbon emissions from large-scale polluters in California, including refineries, cement plants and utilities that yearly emit more than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide or the equivalent in methane, refrigerants and other gases. The goal of the law is to reduce carbon pollution to 1990 levels by 2020, and further in the decades to come.

If regulated companies cannot or choose not to lower emissions to capped levels, they can purchase “allowances” in quarterly online auctions or directly from other polluters that can lower their emissions by reducing production or turning to new technologies. They can also buy “offsets,” which send money to environmental projects around the country that reduce or absorb greenhouse gases.

GAS SHOCKS POSSIBLE

Some market analysts say it is not the cap-and-trade program itself, but rather the sustained lobbying by the transportation fuels industry that could disrupt California’s economy and its ability to regulate pollution equitably and efficiently.

“The continued lobbying from a number of oil companies to change the cap-and-trade provisions for 2015 and after could also bring sudden shifts in supply and demand outlook,” said Emilie Mazzacurati, managing director of Four Twenty Seven, a climate consulting firm in Berkeley.

The Air Resources Board said in June that there were no plans to modify the rules of cap- and-trade to bestow additional advantages on transportation companies. Still, some fuel producers warn that they will leave the state rather than comply with new restrictions.

In addition to cap-and-trade, they object to another provision of the state’s climate rules governing requirements for low-carbon fuels, which they argue would be too costly.

Guy Bjerke, manager of the Bay Area region of the Western States Petroleum Association, a trade group in Sacramento, said that complying with climate regulations would add $5 billion to oil industry costs. “It means we’ll either make fuel at a much increased cost, or refineries will stop making fuel,” he said.

The Boston Consulting Group estimated for the association that the cost of producing gasoline and diesel would rise between 49 and 69 cents per gallon if producers had to purchase carbon allowances through cap-and-trade for emissions beyond their industry’s cap.

Not everyone endorses Big Oil’s predictions. Adrienne Alvord, California and Western States director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy and research group based in Cambridge, Mass., disputed the argument that California refineries would lose their competitive edge to those in other states by participating in cap-and-trade. She said the industry is undergoing a major consolidation, which could lead to closures of refineries, but that process is not being driven by greenhouse gas restrictions.

TRUCKERS REBEL

Two trucking industry groups, the American Trucking Associations and the California Trucking Association, said in correspondence with regulators that complying with cap-and-trade would increase the cost of diesel fuel, so the costs of all consumer goods moved by truck, from televisions to green beans, would rise as well.

The industry has been building the case for exemption for years. In a letter to the Air Resources Board in January 2010, the American Trucking Association cited one industry prediction that complying with cap-and-trade would raise the cost of diesel by as much as 88 cents per gallon.

“Cap-and-trade will not only increase the price of diesel fuel, it also will increase the volatility of diesel prices,” wrote Michael Tunnell, the association’s director of environmental affairs. He added that truckers would have no incentive to consume less diesel. “Trucking is not a discretionary consumer of fuel,” he wrote.

In an interview, Tunnell reiterated that transportation fuels should not be part of cap-and-trade. He said commercial truckers operate on thin margins, typically 2 to 4 percent, so cap-and-trade would threaten their business model. The association argues that California should instead push for moderate national fuel economy standards.

PROMISING START

Just a few months after its November launch, California’s cap-and-trade program appears to be functioning as planned. The Air Resources Board has held three quarterly digital auctions to give companies an opportunity to purchase allowances.

On May 16, 14,522,048 metric tons of carbon were traded. A single allowance went for $14, up from $10.09 in November. There is also a market for allowances extending to 2016, indicating that businesses are thinking ahead about their emissions. Analysts, environmentalists and academics say rising prices indicate that polluters and other traders trust that the cap-and-trade program will continue to operate as planned.

Dan Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, said the auction results — plus an array of other state climate change rules — lend assurance that cap-and-trade will survive challenges, and emissions will start to fall.

California has a “dense network of thoughtful rules on energy and climate,” he said, including the low-carbon fuel standard and land-use regulation designed to reduce vehicle emissions by promoting transit-oriented development. That means cap-and-trade “is reinforced in ways that should keep the sector on pace to emissions reductions.”

AIRLINES, REFINERIES PROFIT

The airline industry has employed several arguments to try to exempt jet fuel from regulation. In a January 2010 letter to the Air Resources Board, Kevin Welsh, then the environmental affairs regulatory manager at the Air Transport Association of America (now known as Airlines for America) cited a provision of the Clean Air Act that prohibits states from enforcing emissions standards different from those set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The correspondence files also show that some oil corporations demanded transportation fuels be left out of the carbon market entirely.

“Do not include transportation fuels in the cap and trade program,” wrote Stephen D. Burns, who was manager of California Government Affairs at Chevron, in a 2010 letter to the agency. He wrote that carbon emissions from transportation fuels should be regulated in other ways, to “drive innovative fuel technology and ensure reliable supplies” for customers.

The Western States Petroleum Association said in a letter that it opposed the “acceleration” of including fuels in cap-and-trade, from 2015 back to 2012. The Air Resources Board “must first analyze the potential impacts, especially the economic impacts” before developing such regulations. In its own correspondence with regulators, British Petroleum echoed that position.

Dave Clegern, a spokesman for the Air Resources Board, said the agency decided to wait until 2015 to bring transportation fuels under the cap-and-trade program because regulators wanted to collect more data on emissions levels at their production facilities.

“We need a certain number of years of mandatory reporting data,” he said. “And we also need to know how much they’re emitting in the air, so we know where they fit under the cap.”

LAWSUITS TAKE AIM

Oil producers and transportation industry associations are not relying on letters alone to press their case. In April, the Pacific Legal Foundation filed a case in California Superior Court charging that cap-and-trade violates the California Constitution because the state receives revenue from selling some allowances.

That suit — filed on behalf of Morning Star Packing Company, Dalton Trucking, the California Construction Trucking Association and other companies in the farming and logging industries — argues that taxes can only be imposed by a two-thirds vote in the Legislature. It mirrors a similar filing by the California Chamber of Commerce on the eve of the cap-and-trade launch in November. Both cases will be tried in a combined hearing on Aug. 28 in state Superior Court in Sacramento, according to court documents.

Chevron and the Western States Petroleum Association filed a lawsuit in 2011 challenging the state’s low-carbon fuel standard, considered an essential complementary regulation. A U.S. district judge in Fresno ruled in December of that year that California’s regulation for lowering the carbon content of fuel was unconstitutional because the attempt to regulate commerce across state borders discriminated against non-California companies. The Air Resources Board appealed and is awaiting a decision from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

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Under California’s cap-and-trade program, which established a carbon trading market last November, electric utilities, corporations, cities, universities and other entities need to lower their emissions or buy pollution “allowances” to account for their emissions.

Importing low-carbon electricity from out-of-state suppliers of renewable sources such as solar, wind, geothermal and hydropower is one way California’s electric utilities can decrease their carbon emissions.

But importing electricity under cap-and-trade presents complications, as it is difficult to distinguish the electrons delivered to California’s grid. While power plant owners here need to report emissions from the point of combustion, California lacks jurisdiction to impose that regulation beyond state boundaries.

These loopholes could lead to resource or contract reshuffling — in which suppliers aim to lower their carbon allowance costs by delivering lower carbon electricity to California, and sending higher emitting power to other states.

“California cannot, under the U.S. Constitution, regulate firms in other states,” said Robert Stavins, director of Harvard University’s Environmental Economics Program.

“It’s virtually impossible to prevent this contract reshuffling,” he said.

According to the California Energy Commission’s data from 2011, California imported 30 percent of its electricity from the Pacific Northwest and Southwest. The balance came from natural-gas fired plants, renewable resources and other sources based in the state.

The California Air Resources Board, the agency responsible for overseeing the cap-and-trade program, is still figuring out how to deal with this issue. The agency said it would place criminal sanctions on importers who practiced resource shuffling, but had to retreat after a commissioner with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission warned that the disruption to California’s electricity market would have “major negative impacts on the economy of the West.”

The agency now allows out-of state electricity suppliers to sell both “specified” and “unspecified” power. Unspecified means power that is not traced to its source. Regulators essentially assign estimates of the carbon content of “unspecified” electricity coming to California’s grid.

Kevin Poloncarz, a California attorney who represents large out-of-state suppliers, said the Air Resources Board set the emissions benchmark or estimate too low for unspecified power. As a result it could lead to “phantom reductions” if suppliers label power as unspecified to minimize costs for carbon allowances, he said.

Last August, Philip Moeller, commissioner with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission sent a letter to Governor Jerry Brown expressing concerns about resource reshuffling provisions in the cap-and-trade program.

“Specifically, by failing to clearly define “resource shuffling” but nevertheless prohibiting it, and by requiring energy importers to affirm, under penalty of perjury, that they have not engaged in resource shuffling, the ARB is creating uncertainty and great concern among entities that sell into California,” he wrote. 

Moeller said that if there is a very tight supply of electricity in California this summer, out-of-state suppliers might be less willing to sell electricity to the state because of resource reshuffling and other factors.

“You could have a real mess on your hands in California that spills over to the entire western market,” Moeller said.

In response to Moeller, the Air Resources Board suspended resource shuffling enforcement provisions until June 2014. The agency is evaluating the need for the provisions, agency spokesman Stanley Young said.

In an effort to clarify its definition of reshuffling activities, the agency identified 13 examples of transactions that do not constitute shuffling, and two that do. CARB said it will incorporate these revisions into regulation this year, then enforce the amended rule.

The list of transactions that do not constitute resource shuffling include electricity deliveries that are needed to replace power resources that are no longer available, replacing expired contracts and early termination of contracts.

The agency used broad language to identify resource shuffling activities. The transactions happen when out-of-state suppliers intentionally replace electricity generated at a high emission plant and sell it in-state to cut carbon allowance costs. Such transactions also occur when these suppliers sell power to another company who then sell a mix of power to California, regulators said.

James Bushnell, associate professor of economics at the University of California at Davis said that by clarifying its definitions of reshuffling — or at least defining actions that it would not consider to be reshuffling — the agency has cleared up uncertainty about potential penalties suppliers could face.

“In that sense the recent developments will technically reduce reshuffling, but more by calling it something else than by eliminating the behavior,” Bushnell said.

Attorney Poloncarz said out-of-state electricity suppliers are concerned that the Air Resources Board may cause confusion in the market by changing shuffling rules yet again before adopting and enforcing them.

If suppliers are worried that the power contracts they sign may be prohibited later under cap-and-trade, they could decide not to take the risk of selling to California in spite of any premium they could get from selling clean power to the state, he said.

While resource shuffling could reduce the overall effectiveness of cap-and-trade, it “doesn’t rise to the level of underlying the basics of the program,” said Tim O’Connor, director of California Climate and Energy Initiative at the Environmental Defense Fund, an environmental organization.

The nascent market also sets the stage for a much larger cap-and-trade program, when other states follow California’s lead, O’Connor said.

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The automatic federal budget cuts that rolled out on Friday — known as the sequester — are going to hurt the University of California, San Francisco. The world-class teaching hospital and research center receives funding from the National Institutes of Health. According to KQED’s “California Report,” the university’s vice chancellor for research, Keith Yamamoto, said that some laboratories have already instituted hiring freezes.

The blogs are picking up on the series of dominos that are going to hit a wide variety of social services. The Huffington Post San Francisco put together a slideshow on Bay Area services that will be forced to offer fewer services. Contra Costa’s Meals on Wheels program will lose $100,000.

San Francisco’s homeless activists predict a $1 million cut in federal funding, the San Francisco Bay Guardian reported.

* * *

One area apparently free from the ripple effects of Washington budget cuts (so far): expanded free access to public transit for youth in San Francisco. Starting Friday, children 5 to 17 years old from low- to moderate-income households became eligible for a free Clipper Card, reports Mission Local.

San Francisco-based nonprofit People Organized to Win Employment Rights and community and civic leaders, including Supervisor David Campos, fought for months for the program, which will cost $8.7 million. It comes at a good time for students, since the San Francisco Unified School District’s yellow school bus system has slashed its bus service by 43 percent, Mission Local reported.

But support for the program — it’s for the children! — was not universal. The money had to come from somewhere, and in this case it resulted in deferred maintenance.

The Public Press reported last year that city supervisors debated whether it should use part of $6.7 million in federal funds from the regional Metropolitan Transportation Agency for the program — or buy new vehicles and upgrade Muni’s infrastructure.

“For decades, we as a city have severely underinvested in Muni,” Supervisor Scott Wiener said at a committee hearing last year. “There’s always a reason for diverting money away from Muni.” 

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But it’s the claim by opponents of the measure, including large manufacturers and agribusinesses, that food prices would skyrocket if the proposition passes that is riling proponents, mostly environmentalists, public health groups and farmers.

Proponents of labeling say the real problem with food prices is the longstanding monopoly control of agribusiness corporations, which hold genetically modified seed patents. Their influence on growers and food producers has artificially boosted costs, and any added cost of a label would be minor in comparison.

Whatever the effect on food prices for genetically modified and non-modified foods, drawing consumers’ attention to the distinction will provide them with a choice that could affect the economics of agriculture in California and beyond. It could give producers of organic and other non-modified crops a marketing advantage, and possibly a boost to their business.

“I think that when people have a choice, many people will opt out of the genetic engineering experiment, and that will benefit farmers who grow non-genetically-engineered varieties,” said Julie Cummins, education director at the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture.

The San Francisco-based nonprofit group, which runs the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, tells prospective vendors that their products “cannot knowingly contain genetically modified ingredients” or seed stock.

The No on 37 campaign, which gets most of its funding from food manufacturers and agricultural and chemical businesses such as Monsanto and DuPont, contends that the labels would force food manufacturers to buy more expensive ingredients to avoid having to put the scary-sounding warning on their products.

The anti-labeling campaign points to an economic study claiming that the change would increase annual grocery prices by $350 to $400 for the average California family.

Proponents of the measure, of course, dispute that claim.

The Yes on 37 campaign, endorsed by some food retailers and manufacturers, farmers markets and other consumer organizations, says labeling would not increase food costs for either manufacturers or consumers.

Miguel Altieri, a professor of agroecology at University of California, Berkeley, said trading of food commodities on Wall Street by corporations is to blame for high prices, not the prospect of a label on the package.

“Food prices have been increasing in the last two, three years all over the world, and more than 30 percent per year,” Altieri said. He said corporations that hold proprietary rights to genetically modified organisms control the commercial food system, and the markets.

Some San Francisco Bay Area farmers said the dominance of genetically altered crops in the food market reduces consumer choices.

“It’s conferring ownership of our food resources to a few corporate vested interests,” said Al Courchesne, owner of Frog Hollow Farm in Brentwood, who sells organic fruit at farmers markets in San Francisco and Berkeley. “Eventually that’s going to increase the cost of food for all human beings.”

But the economics of food can be complicated, agricultural economists say. Some experts in Northern California argue that prices of food have fallen because genetic modification saves farmers money.

Colin Carter, director of the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics at University of California, Davis, said genetic engineering has allowed farmers to produce crops with fewer chemicals and improve yields.

“Ninety percent of soybean farmers are using this technology,” Carter said. “There must be some benefit to them.”

But ecological concerns persist. Some local farmers who eschew genetically modified crops say the proliferation of artificial genes in neighboring fields could ruin their crops. Scientists have found that in some instances modified pollen can blow in the wind and contaminate natural crops, making produce unfit to sell as organic.

Farmers markets in other cities are going the way of San Francisco’s. The Ecology Center, an environmental organization that operates farmers’ markets in Berkeley and Albany, also bans food containing genetically modified organisms.

Ben Feldman, the organization’s program manager, said the decision was largely customer-driven, but also tied to what environmentalists call the “precautionary principle.”

“Until we have good information that something is very safe,” Feldman said, “we should be cautious about using it.”

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The sensors provide real-time local data on how much carbon dioxide is being emitted, said lead researcher Ronald Cohen, professor of chemistry and of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.

“What we hope the network will tell us is which of the many policies is working,” Cohen said. “It’ll tell us if cap-and-trade is the most effective thing we’re doing or electric cars is the most effective.”

Cap-and-trade, a component of California’s Assembly Bill 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act, uses various tools to reduce greenhouse gas pollution. The program puts an overall limit on emissions produced by oil refineries, utility companies and other emitters. Industries participating in the program receive emission allowances — either the full amount for free, or a set percentage for free and the rest for purchase — that they can then sell on the market if they lower their emissions, creating an incentive for each business to reduce its carbon footprint. 

The California Air Resources Board, the agency running the program, will hold the first auction for allowances on Nov. 14.

Cohen said his team expects to distinguish among different sources of carbon dioxide pollution, such as the fraction from cars versus that from home heating systems.

The measurements obtained from the network could potentially be used to guide climate-friendly policies, including the promotion of high-density housing near public transportation.

In addition to carbon dioxide, the sensors monitor nitrogen dioxide, ozone and carbon monoxide levels. Data from the sensors is available on the Berkeley Atmospheric CO2 Observation Network project website.

Cohen said the project is unique because of the large number of sensors to be installed across the region.

So far only 10 sensors have been mounted, he said, but his team plans to put up a total of 40 in a network extending from El Cerrito to San Leandro. Most will be in Oakland. The sensors cost about $4,000 each and have been installed on rooftops of schools in Oakland with the goal of educating children about atmospheric science and measurements.

Cohen plans to install one at the Exploratorium in San Francisco when it moves to its new location at Pier 15.

The carbon dioxide sensor network is interesting to government officials because the gas has not yet been monitored locally. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which regulates air pollution, does not itself monitor carbon dioxide, but tracks emissions of the gas from industry reports, officials at the agency said.

“Carbon dioxide is not technically an air pollutant,” said Eric Stevenson, director of technical services at the air district. “It doesn’t have a direct health impact, so it’s not part of our monitoring network, but we do want to have a picture, because it’s important in terms of climate change.”

The sensors may also prove to be a useful tool for environmental policy planners.

“Generally, we do not monitor air quality at this fine-grained of a scale,” said Laura Tam, sustainable development policy director at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. “It will be interesting to look at data from this network, once it is built out over time, to see how much variation there is at the city or sub-regional scale.”

Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas responsible for global warming. Tam said the major impacts of climate change in the Bay Area would be a rising sea level and an increase in extreme weather patterns.

“We’ll see increased hot weather in San Francisco,” she said. “In fact, parts of San Francisco and Alameda counties — because we haven’t really constructed buildings and housing to deal with hot weather — are some of the most heat-vulnerable places in the entire United States.”

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When Lili Samad was hired to work as a nanny for an Egyptian government official in the Bay Area, she thought it was an ideal job. Instead, she said, she was forced to work long hours doing domestic chores and forbidden from contacting her family in Indonesia and was often locked inside the house.

“First when I arrived there, they treated me like a prisoner,” Samad said.

After almost 3½ years, for which she was paid just $1,000, she sought help from a neighbor she had met a few times. She said the neighbor concealed her in the back seat of a car and took her to a police station.

But after she escaped, Samad faced a whole new set of challenges: finding housing and a stable job to pay for it. Samad stayed with the neighbor for a few months before moving to the Asian Women’s Shelter, a San Francisco nonprofit that provides temporary housing for women who have suffered violence. There, case managers connected her to community rehabilitation services for victims. Still, the road to recovery was rocky. Over the course of six years, she lived in four temporary apartments before settling down in subsidized housing.

People trafficked into the country — through force, fraud or coercion — receive temporary government and nonprofit social service benefits after rescue or flight from captivity. These include shelter, health care, counseling, employment and legal help. Victims are helped to stay here in exchange for cooperation with law enforcement, and because they might face retribution from trafficking rings if they returned home.

But once these benefits term out, counter-trafficking specialists worry that victims, who generally have little work experience and weak social and family networks, could fall back into labor conditions as exploitative as the ones they fled.

As a victim of international labor trafficking, Samad received government help to stay in the U.S. But she is among hundreds of trafficking survivors each year who end up, months after getting help trying to build a new life, living in marginal housing and working in low-wage jobs.

Samad, who works part-time as a waitress at an elder care facility with her husband and lives in a low-income public housing unit in the Bay Area, said their combined income is only sufficient to pay for basic needs.

“We cannot spend on other things, so only food and rent,” she said.

From fiscal year 2002 through May of this year, the U.S. government issued 3,042 visas for trafficking victims, called T-1 Nonimmigrant Status visas, data from the U.S.

Citizenship and Immigration Services show. These provide temporary protection and a chance to apply for permanent residency for those trafficked from foreign nations.

Experts say it is difficult to identify and quantify the number of victims in this country or those who are re-exploited. Not all victims of sex or labor trafficking seek help from government agencies or community groups. And international trafficking incidents in the U.S. are diverse. They can involve the exploitation of farm laborers by contracting companies, the abuse of domestic workers by foreign diplomats and the coercion of people into prostitution by pimps.

Traffickers often hide victims in their homes, brothels, boats or other clandestine locations.

Risk of re-exploitation

A recent in-depth academic study by researchers at the University of Texas, Austin and North Carolina A & T State University, looked at women in Texas who had been trafficked from other countries. It showed that victims need targeted, long-lasting and culturally sensitive services to help them rebuild their lives.

Almost all of the women interviewed for the study now work in restaurants, hotels and other service jobs. This presents a challenge for their rehabilitation, said Noël Busch-Armendariz, director of the Institute on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault at the School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin, and one of the authors of the report, published in the Journal of Applied Research on Children.

One of the long-term needs of trafficking survivors is acquiring new life and professional skills, so they can move toward jobs that give them more security and income, Busch-Armendariz said.

“If we don’t give survivors and their children ways to fully integrate, ways to be self-sufficient, they could continue to be targeted as somebody who could be exploited,” she said.

A 38-year-old single mother from the Philippines, who requested that her name not be used, said she came to the U.S. to work as a housekeeper for an ambassador from Africa more than three years ago. But as soon as she arrived in New Jersey, her employer seized her passport and work contract.

“The first thing that made me scared is they said their house is alarmed — if I open the door, the alarm will go off, and the police will arrive and take me away,” she said in her native Tagalog through an interpreter.
The woman said her employer paid her $1,000 per month for working 17-hour days, threw a fork at her in a fit of anger and made her scrub the kitchen when she was ill. “I was so scared,” she said. “I was always nervous. I was feeling sick.”

With the help of the ambassador’s driver, she contacted the Damayan Migrant Workers Association, a nonprofit group in New York City, which helped rescue her.

She said finding work has been difficult, and potential employers fear her trafficking background. She now works as a part-time nanny, but the pay is not sufficient to support herself.

“In truth, it’s short,” she said. “Not enough. My part-time work is just enough for the housing. There’s no health insurance.”

Community groups say survivors run the risk of re-exploitation if they work in sectors that are not properly regulated.

“This is especially true in the domestic worker industry, but any kind of informal sector where people are kind of more hidden from sight,” said Cindy Liou, staff attorney and coordinator of the Human Trafficking Project at Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco that provides legal services for victims.

“It’s not uncommon that some of our clients sometimes come back to us with wage-and-hour questions, and we refer them out to the Employment Law Center and other places usually so they know their rights,” Liou said.

The benefits clock

County, state and federal governments offer a variety of temporary benefits to help smooth the way to rehabilitation for victims of international human trafficking.

Victims granted a T visa or continued presence status — a short-term immigration status from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — receive certification from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to access public benefits at the same level as refugees.

Benefits typically last eight months, and include cash assistance, health care, food stamps, job training, English courses, transportation passes and other services.

Some states, such as California and New York, have approved short-term benefits to assist trafficking survivors in the process of qualifying for federal benefits.

The maximum benefit for single adult T visa clients in San Francisco is $422 per month, which includes a county supplement of $105, said Josef Bruckback, eligibility manager of the state’s welfare program CalWorks at the Human Services Agency in San Francisco. Clients with children receive benefits through CalWorks and are eligible for services for up to 48 months.

“The overarching problem is that once they time out of those benefits, they’re really left on their own,” said Denise Brennan, associate professor and chair of the department of anthropology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. “It’s a very short time frame. It’s not likely that they have built a social network that could fill in where the government support leaves off.”

Survivors generally find work in the same labor sector they worked in when they were trafficked, Brennan said, and it’s usually low-wage work, limiting their economic mobility.

“What I think is really quite concerning is that over time, some of the first T visa recipients who now have green cards are just treading water,” she said. “Just in the past six months, I’ve heard about some folks who have lost their jobs.”

Hurdles in finding housing

Trafficking survivors often have difficulty finding an economical place to live in the long term. Some migrate from shelters to transitional housing until they can secure an affordable room or apartment. Others find temporary accommodations by working as live-in nannies.

A 64-year-old woman, who requested that her name not be used because she feared her former captor, said she came to California from Peru because her brother-in-law offered her work as a nanny to take care of his granddaughter. But he made her cook, wash, clean, garden and do other domestic work for about 14 hours a day, and restricted her from getting in touch with her family, she said.

“He invited me to come over here with the promise of work, and that he would support me in everything, but it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t true,” she said in Spanish through an interpreter.

After he released her from his house more than a year later, she found work as a nanny for a family in the Bay Area, who provided a space for her to stay in their home. She said she has lived in low-income housing apartments and has worked low-wage jobs at stores and cafes in the region since then.

She now earns $11 an hour working at a chain supermarket and lives in a subsidized apartment with her son.

Community organizations that provide shelter and rehabilitation services for international trafficking victims say finding both short-term and long-term affordable housing is difficult, and without proper housing, they could be at risk for re-victimization.

At the Asian Women’s Shelter in San Francisco, case managers start looking for housing once the victim has stabilized and recovered from the trauma, said Hediana Utarti, the group’s community projects coordinator. For trafficking survivors in the process of applying for a T visa, they look for housing that meshes with the government benefits.

“It’s very, very tight, but we would look for a place where maybe they can share with other people,” Utarti said. “Usually we are able to find something like a live-in situation, like help with the elderly.”

Those situations often work as barter: trafficking survivors provide support for elderly people who give accommodations in return. Survivors sometimes find these work opportunities on their own through friends.
While most of the time this type of arrangement works, employers have been known to abuse the trafficking survivors by making them do more work than they signed up for, or not giving any breaks during their shifts, Utarti said.

When this type of re-exploitation occurs, case managers advise the trafficking victims to talk about the situation with their employers. “If need be, then we’ll do intervention,” she said.

In San Francisco, case managers also work with the city to identify space in single-room occupancy hotels, and if the clients have children, they look for housing in transitional facilities, such as the Compass Clara House, Raphael House and Hamilton Family Center.

Clients can stay for up to three months, but the Asian Women’s Shelter provides extensions for clients unable to find housing, to ensure that they do not find themselves on the streets.

“If they end up in a homeless shelter, then they’re going to go back to the whole cycle again — re-abuse,” Utarti said. “And we don’t want to do that.”

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A special visa created 12 years ago to save thousands of victims of human trafficking and curb international human trafficking has been vastly underutilized.

Attorneys for rescued victims seeking residency protection say law enforcement agencies are often unwilling or slow to “certify” victims’ claims of having been brought to the U.S. to work by force, fraud or coercion.

Legal experts and social service providers in high-trafficking regions, including the San Francisco Bay Area, suggest that victims are placed in a dangerous dilemma: Promising to cooperate with an investigation could possibly help their visa cases, but it could also expose them and their families back home to retaliation.

One result is that victims only apply for a fraction of the visas available each year. Last year the government received one-fifth of its quota, and of the applications received nearly 23 percent were rejected.

Lawyers and service providers for trafficking victims said the lack of assistance from law enforcement slowed or derailed what they called deserving applications. In one case, a domestic servant who worked 16-hour days for no pay for years earned a T visa with the help of a crusading lawyer despite the lack of certification by federal law enforcement officials.

Created by the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, the T-1 Nonimmigrant Status visa provides trafficking victims from foreign countries temporary legal status, with an opportunity to apply for permanent residency and access to federal benefits if they cooperate with law enforcement in the investigations of their traffickers. Minors and those unable to participate in investigations because of physical or psychological trauma are excused, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that adjudicates the visa applications.

Data supplied by the agency reveals that only a few hundred T visas have been issued each year since the program began, despite a yearly quota of 5,000 available. According to the agency, in the last fiscal year 557 T visa applications were approved and 223 were rejected.

The original federal trafficking law, authored by Rep. Christopher Smith, R-New Jersey, has been reauthorized three times, and revisions have included lowering the visa qualification standards and increasing services available to trafficking victims.

Scholars specializing in international human trafficking laws say the program is flawed because the help it offers victims is hinged on their willingness to assist in the investigations.

“It would be much better to have a system where your protections were not dependent on you giving evidence against the person who trafficked you, which is the case for children,” said Jacqueline Bhabha, director of research at Harvard University’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights.

Helping law enforcement

The T visa application encourages applicants to submit “primary evidence” of their cooperation, which consists of a law enforcement certification that they have agreed to support investigations of their traffickers.

Attorneys and social service providers who work with T visa applicants say obtaining the  certification is often an impediment in the application process.

Zoraida Peña Canal was trafficked from Peru to be a domestic servant in Contra Costa County five years ago. Sacramento attorney Avantika Rao helped her obtain a T visa, even though she said she was unable to get certification from law enforcement.

Peña Canal entered the U.S. in July 2006 to live with and work for a Walnut Creek family. She was put to work from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. each day for no pay caring for two children and doing chores, though her employer assured her that she would be paid.

Rao said Peña Canal escaped with the help of three neighbors. She learned about Peña Canal’s case when she was working at La Raza Centro Legal, a San Francisco-based organization that provides legal services to immigrants and low-income people.

Rao said in an email that law enforcement denied the certification though her client was doing everything possible to cooperate in the investigation.

“Ms. Peña Canal and I met with law enforcement agents and the U.S. Attorney’s Office on at least a dozen occasions during which Ms. Peña Canal provided physical evidence as well as testimony with regards to the crime,” Rao said.

After a series of requests to the U.S. Attorney’s Office to supply the certification, she was notified in September 2008 that the office would not provide the document.

“I was absolutely devastated by their decision, especially because they implied that they did not trust my client and did not view her case as important,” Rao said.

She submitted the T visa application anyway, without the certification. The lack of certification, she said, places “a much higher burden on the victim’s advocate to insert more details and documents in the T visa application, all of which are potentially discoverable by counsel for the trafficker in a legal proceeding.”

Despite these hurdles, Peña Canal’s T visa application was approved in January 2009.

Peña Canal relocated to San Francisco, where she now can be legally employed. She works as a janitor at a San Francisco company, cares for seniors in their homes and cleans houses on a referral basis.

Fear of retaliation

Government agencies denying certification for T visa applicants is a common theme. Hilary Chester, associate director of anti-trafficking services at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, said law enforcement officials stalled on signing the certification for a client who was trafficked from El Salvador.

“I think what still bothers me personally is this notion that so much weight is given to the law enforcement piece, and that there is this requirement that a person be willing to cooperate in the prosecution,” Chester said. “I think it’s slippery.”

Her client did receive a T visa — more than two years later.

Legal service providers said that in addition to the hassle of getting law enforcement’s blessing, trafficked individuals also fear that applying for the visa may subject their families back home to threats.

“I think the biggest concerns are not so much fear in reporting the trafficking or talking to law enforcement about what’s happened, but it is very scary to be in a situation where they may potentially have to confront their traffickers in court — and the fears of retaliation for family back home,” said Lynette Parker, clinical supervising attorney for the immigration program of the Katharine and George Alexander Community Law Center, based at Santa Clara University.

“One of the biggest challenges for us is to identify NGOs on the ground in the home countries that can help give information and provide safety to the families,” she said, adding that many non-governmental organizations provide services to victims in coordination with U.S. groups.

Some clients are also apprehensive about going through with the investigations because of the stigma they and their families might face in their communities if U.S. investigators start asking questions abroad, as the FBI does occasionally.

Hediana Utarti, community projects coordinator at the Asian Women’s Shelter in San Francisco, said she had a case in which a family brought a young woman to the U.S. from Asia by promising her work as a cook and offering to send her to school. She said the woman did cook, but was also forced to participate in sex parties in the family’s home.

Utarti said that when the trafficking survivor applied for a T visa, law enforcement officials interviewed her, and they contacted her client’s siblings in her home country for the investigation.

“So it’s very scary for that person to have that situation where there are a lot of people talking about you,” Utarti said.

Steven Merrill, a supervisory special agent at the FBI’s San Francisco office, said agents sometimes travel to home countries of trafficked victims, but it is rare.

He said the hardest part for investigators in trafficking cases is that in many cases victims are unwilling to share their stories of victimization.

“There’s a variety of reasons why that may be, but that will always remain a difficulty from the FBI and any other law enforcement’s perspective in accomplishing our mission to put human traffickers — to convict them in court,” Merrill said.

Success stories

In cases in which the T visa program works, it offers trafficking victims freedom to emerge from oppressive situations and live and work in the country.

A 63-year-old Bay Area woman who was trafficked from Peru to the U.S. by her brother-in-law said she was paid $80 every 15 days for working at his house in Los Angeles.

The woman, who requested anonymity for fear that her trafficker might track her down, said in an interview that she worked about 14 hours a day, seven days a week. She said he forbade her from contacting her family in Lima, Peru.

“They didn’t want me to answer the phone, they didn’t want me to call my children on the phone,” she said. “I would never receive a letter from my kids. Nothing. They didn’t want me to go to church either. I am Catholic, so I wanted to go every Sunday, but they didn’t want me to go to the street, leave the garden. They didn’t want me to go out at all.”

After fleeing the situation, she was helped by the attorneys at Santa Clara University to obtain a T visa, and she is now free to live and work in the U.S.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has sought to raise public awareness of the T visa program. Sharon Rummery, the agency’s spokeswoman in San Francisco, said her office has provided training nationwide to law enforcement, community-based organizations and the media, to explain the T visa and similar programs.

“We very much want people to know that the T is available, people to understand what it means to be trafficked,” she said. “Some people may not even know that they’ve been trafficked.”

Overcoming isolation

Some human trafficking experts said that building a life in the U.S. after receiving a T visa is challenging for survivors because they feel isolated, and have trouble finding long-term housing and accessing victim services.

Denise Brennan, an associate professor and chair of the anthropology department at Georgetown University, said that in contrast to trafficking survivors, political and economic refugees tend to settle in communities where others from their communities are located.

“Generally speaking, refugees, they are not moving to a community completely alone,” Brennan said. “Formerly trafficked persons generally are resettled alone in communities that are not made up of formerly trafficked persons. In fact, no one would know that they were trafficked unless they told them.”

Some Bay Area advocates for trafficking survivors said that finding long-term housing after escaping is also problematic.

Mollie Ring, chief of programs at Standing Against Global Exploitation, a nonprofit group that provides services to trafficking victims, said it is tough for her clients to find affordable housing in San Francisco after they leave short-term, transitional housing.

Victims, she said, face a dilemma: “A client sometimes leaves the Bay Area in order to find a reasonable quality of life. But that means that they are disconnected from services. So it’s some of the Catch-22 there.”

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