Community Input on State Environmental Justice Screening Tools

• Date: 01 June 2022
• Author: Laura Grier, Delia Mayor, Brett Zeuner, and Paul Mohai

62022 ENVIRONMENTAL LAW REPORTER 52 ELR 10441

COMMENTS

COMMUNITY INPUT ON STATE

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

SCREENING TOOLS

by Laura Grier, Delia Mayor, Brett Zeuner, and Paul Mohai

Laura Grier works for an environmental philanthropy focused on climate and clean energy. Delia

Mayor is a Senior Research Associate at a consulting firm in Washington, D.C. Brett Zeuner is the

Manager of the Environmental Equity Program at the Foundation for California Community Colleges.

Paul Mohai is Professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan,

a member of the Michigan Advisory Council on Environmental Justice, and Lead Investigator on a

project to advance development and use of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s EJSCREEN.

A

number of environmental justice screening tools

and processes have been developed across the

United States in an eort to identify communities

experiencing environmental injustice. ese tools combine

environmental and demographic data sets, layer them over

a map, and present the map in a web-based format.1 Users

1. Charles Lee, A Game Changer in the Making? Lessons From States Advancing

Environmental Justice rough Mapping and Cumulative Impact Strategies,

50 ELR 10203 (Mar. 2020), available at https://www.elr.info/articles/elr-

articles/game-changer-making-lessons-states-advancing-environmental-jus-

tice-through; Arianna Zrzavy et al., Addressing Cumulative Impacts: Lessons

Learned From Environmental Justice Screening Tool Development and Resis-

tance, 52 ELR 10111 (Feb. 2022), available at https://www.elr.info/articles/

elr-articles/addressing-cumulative-impacts-lessons-environmental-justice-

screening-tool.

can typica lly zoom in on a certain geographic area and see

data specic to that area.2 Environmental justic e screening

tools can help identif y vulnerable and di sproportionately

impacted communities, and can reect the cumulative

nature of environmental, social, and health-related impacts

that community members experience. Developing these

tools is one major step state and federal governments can

take to both better understa nd the cumulative nature of

environmental and social impacts a nd incorporate cumula-

tive impacts into their decisionmaking processes.3

At the national level, the U.S. Environmental Protection

Agency (EPA) maintains EJSCREEN, a publicly avail-

able online screening tool that combines environmental

and demographic data and displays environmental justice

indexes at the census block group level.4 EJSCR EEN d is-

plays six demographic data sets from the America n Com-

munities Survey and 11 environmental data sets. e tool

combines the demographic information with each environ-

mental indicator in an “Environmental Justice Index.”

In addition to EJSCREEN, 18 states—Cali fornia,

Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Maryl and, Mas-

sachusetts, Michiga n, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey,

New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania,

Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin—have a state-spe-

cic environmental justice screening tool in use or in the

process of development.5 Many of these state-level tools

2. Lee, supra note 1.

3. Id.

4. O  P, U.S. EPA, EJSCREEN E J

M  S T: EJSCREEN T D-

 (2019), https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/les/2017-09/docu-

ments/2017_ejscreen_technical_document.pdf.

5. For information on the development and methodologies of these state-

specic screening tools, see California Oce of Environmental Health

Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), CalEnviroScreen, https://oehha.ca.gov/

calenviroscreen (last visited Apr. 18, 2022); Colorado Department of

Public Health and Environment, Colorado EnviroScreen, https://cdphe.

colorado.gov/enviroscreen (last visited Apr. 18, 2022); Press Release, Con-

Authors’ Note: We would like to acknowledge and thank the

many individuals who made this research possible. First, we

sincerely thank Michelle Martinez, former executive direc-

tor of the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition (MEJC),

for her guidance and direction throughout this research. We

also thank MEJC coalition members for partnering with us

in this research and for the incessant and tireless work they

devote to advancing environmental justice in Michigan. Fi-

nally, we would like to thank the 30 environmental justice

advocates in Michigan who allowed us to interview them

for this Comment. We are grateful for their time and for their

providing us a window into their lives and experiences.

This research was originally conducted at the Univer-

sity of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainabil-

ity, which acknowledges the university’s origins through an

1817 land transfer from the Anishinaabek, the Three Fires

People: the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Bodewadami, as well

as Meskwahkiasahina (Fox), Peoria, and Wyandot. The

institution’s full land acknowledgement can be found at

https://seas.umich.edu/about.

Copyright © 2022 Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, DC. Reprinted with permission from ELR®, http://www.eli.org, 1-800-433-5120.