Data Tools Driving Environmental & Climate Justice
EPA’s data tools help leverage information to better inform decision-making, including helping identify communities that are overburdened and underserved.
Click through the information below to learn more about how each tool can benefit your research and understanding of issues.
Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJEST)
In January of 2021, President Biden issued Executive Order 14008. The order directed the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to develop a new tool. This tool is called the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool. The tool has an interactive map and uses datasets that indicate burdens in eight categories: climate change, energy, health, housing, legacy pollution, transportation, water and wastewater, and workforce development. This information identifies communities that are overburdened and underserved.
To learn more, visit Climate & Economic Justice Screening Tool
EJScreen
EJScreen is an EPA environmental justice mapping and screening tool that provides the Agency with a nationally consistent dataset and approach for combining environmental and socioeconomic indicators.
EJScreen users choose a geographic area; the tool then provides environmental, socioeconomic, health, and other important community information for that location. All of the tool’s indicators are created from publicly available data. EJScreen simply provides web-based platform to display this information and includes a method for combining the data into EJ and supplemental indexes.
To learn more, visit EJScreen
Power Plants and Neighboring Communities
The following map identifies the locations of power plants and highlights the key demographics of people living within three miles of those plants. The map displays all fossil fuel-fired power plants that supply electricity to the grid. You can filter the plants displayed on the map based on demographics, plant characteristics such as size and fuel type, and quantity of annual plant-level emissions of SO2, NOX, CO2, and PM2.5. For example, you could filter the data to only display the largest emitting coal-fired plants with neighboring communities above the 80th percentile nationally of low-income population. Additional layers which can be toggled on/off include power plant emissions, area demographics, and Tribal areas.
To learn more, visit Power Plants and Neighboring Communities | US EPA