Experts to White House: EJ Screening Tool Should Consider Race

Abt’s T.J. Pepping spoke to E&E News’ ClimateWire about the Biden Administration’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, a tool meant to help administrators identify communities that would benefit from increased federal investment in environmental justice. Specifically, the article discussed the public comments that cited a need for greater data on the inequitable impacts of pollution. Pepping highlighted the need to disaggregate data to truly understand who is being impacted, and how.

“You might have a lot of communities that pop up as disadvantaged because they are located near these different types of facilities, but there may be really big differences between those communities in terms of what their actual burden is,” he said. “Inherently, with the screen approach, you’re just identifying places where there might be potential concerns, but there’s still a lot more that could be done to actually unpack that.”