Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool (EJScreen)

Description:

EPA EJScreen is EPA’s environmental justice mapping and screening tool that provides EPA with a nationally consistent dataset and approach to present three kinds of information: environmental burden indicators, socioeconomic indicators and EJ/Supplemental Indexes.
EJScreen combines demographic and environmental indicators to highlight places that may have environmental quality issues, higher environmental burdens, and vulnerable populations.

The EJ Indexes combine demographic information with a single environmental burden indicator to display areas that may have a high combination of vulnerable populations and environmental burden. Specifically, an EJ Index is calculated by multiplying a single environmental burden indicator and the Demographic Index (an average of % low-income and % people of color for each location).
On the other hand, the Supplemental Indexes combine socioeconomic information with a single environmental burden indicator to display communities with both high environmental burden and socioeconomic vulnerability. A Supplemental Index is calculated by multiplying a single environmental indicator and the Supplemental Demographic Index (an average of % low-income, % persons with disabilities, % limited English speaking, % less than high school education, and low life expectancy for each location). Compared to the EJ indexes, the Supplemental Indexes offer more insight on community-level vulnerability by measuring socioeconomic burden in the five-factor Supplemental Demographic Index.

EJScreen presents each indicator or index value as a percentile normalized to either the state or the nation, ranked from 0 to 100. These percentile ranks indicate the proportion of geographies with equal or lower burden compared to the geography of interest.
For example, if you are looking at the Lead Paint EJ Index (National Percentiles) on the tract-level, a Lead Paint EJ Index percentile of 80 means that 80% of tracts in the nation have less potential exposure to lead paint than the tract of interest, and that 20% of tracts in the nation have greater potential exposure to lead paint.
The U.S. percentiles use the U.S. population as the basis of comparison, and the state percentiles are calculated based on the population in a given state (or District of Columbia or Puerto Rico). State percentiles may provide useful information in identifying how high an indicator is relative to the rest of that state.

EJScreen may be used to support educational programs, grant writing, community awareness efforts, and other purposes. Previously, EPA identified areas with any EJ index at or above the 80th percentile nationally as a starting point for further analysis or outreach for environmental justice concerns. The 80th percentile filter has been used for internal EPA use and is not necessarily intended to apply to states or other organizations.
Furthermore, EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) defines low-income and disadvantaged communities as census block groups that are at or above the 90th percentile for EJ Screen’s Supplemental Indexes and those defined as disadvantaged through the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool.

For more information on the uses and limitations of EJScreen, visit https://www.epa.gov/ejscreen/purposes-and-uses-ejscreen.