Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool

Identifying Disadvantaged Communities Using Cumulative Environmental Burdens

Welcome to the CEJST+ tool. This tool is a reimagining of the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST) created as part of the Justice40 initiative in 2021. CEJST looks for disadvantaged communities by considering various environmental and economic burdens of census tracts. A burden represents one of 8 broad environmental and economic categories of climate change, energy, health, housing, legacy pollution, transportation, water and wastewater, and workforce development. Each burden category has between 2-5 associated indicators.

The original identification of disadvantaged communities has been expanded to include two new approaches: cumulative and hot spot. The cumulative approach shows the total number of exceeded thresholds for burdens and indicators. The hot spot approach visualizes clusters of unusally high or low exceeded thresholds as hot or cold spots. The legacy layer shows the original CEJST tool. More detailed information about the layers, burdens, and indicators can be found by navigating to the methodology. page.

0 Burdens8 Burdens

Burden Thresholds Exceeded

This layer explores total burdens in a census tract. The number of thresholds exceeded can be found by selecting a specific census tract.

Interpreting the Map

Light colors represent a small number of thresholds exceeded while darker colors represent a high number of thresholds exceeded.

Things to know:

The tool uses census tracts a tract icon informing the user of census tracts . Census tracts are a small unit of geography. They generally have populations a people icon informing the user of communities of between 1,200 - 8,000 people.

The tool ranks most of the burdens using percentiles An icon that a bell curve or gaussian distribution . Percentiles show how much burden each tract experiences when compared to other tracts.

Thresholds An icon shows a up arrow with a lower limit implying that it's above a threshold , or cutoffs, are used to assign disadvantaged status. Certain burdens use percentages An icon that depicts a part of pie chart being removed or a simple yes/no An icon that depicts a check mark conveying yes and/or no .