Biden Administration Launches Environmental Justice Screening Tool
By Johani Carolina Ponce / Huella Zero *
The White House released the latest version of an online data mapping tool, created to help channel billions of federal dollars earmarked for disadvantaged communities, the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST). Environmental justice is the fair treatment and meaningful participation of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. This is the concept used by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The CEJST tool will incorporate new metrics similar in its usefulness to the redlining system. The term redlining has come to mean racial discrimination of any kind when it comes to housing, but it comes from government maps that delineated areas where African-American residents lived and were therefore considered risky investments. CEJST will work to favor the most vulnerable, unlike redlining. It will also warn about the risk of forest fires and the proximity of abandoned mines.
The Climate and Economic Justice Assessment Tool, which has been years in the making, contains interactive maps that will help federal agencies ensure that disadvantaged communities reap at least 40 percent of the benefits of climate-related spending, fulfilling a Biden administration plan known as Justice 40. The idea is to overlay metrics like air pollution and flood risk with health and economic indicators like energy costs and rates of asthma and diabetes. “Every community, regardless of ZIP code, should have clean water to drink, healthy air to breathe, and protection from extreme weather events,” White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Brenda Mallory said in a statement. According to Mallory, the launched tool will direct funds to places that “have suffered the brunt of pollution so that we can make sure they are some of the first to see the benefits of climate action.”
The tool uses census tracts to identify more than 27,000 communities labeled as “disadvantaged.” Communities are considered disadvantaged if they are in a census tract that meets the threshold for at least one of the categories considered by the tool and the corresponding economic indicator or are on the lands of a federally recognized tribe. Categories under which a community will be identified as “disadvantaged” include climate change, energy, health, housing, legacy pollution, transportation, water and wastewater, and workforce development.
*Johani Carolina Ponce is a Venezuelan journalist who works with the organization Sachamama.org as Latino Media Engagement Manager of the Zero Footprint Program.
