The Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool (“EJScreen”) is a tool that shows environmental justice priorities put into practice. First developed in 2010 during the Obama administration, EJScreen was adopted by the EPA in 2012, peer-reviewed in 2014, and launched for public use in 2015.
As the photo slideshow demonstrates, using New Orleans as a case study, the EJScreen tool aggregates spatial data on demographics and environmental hazards to allow users to view interactions between socioeconomic status and environmental risk. Follow the link to use it for yourself.
What kind of data collection efforts support a mapping tool like this? What might the tool be used for, and by whom? And who might want to remove public access to such a tool, and why?
Note: This link is for a “mirror” of the EJScreen tool. The original EJScreen was hosted on the web by the federal government and the EPA. In early 2025, the Environmental Protection Agency removed public access to EJScreen. The link provided is for a nearly identical copy of the EJScreen tool reconstructed by a team of environmental researchers and organizations.
