If you want to know more about environmental justice, also known as EJ, this tool is a great place to start. It helps identify and visualize environmental justice neighborhoods in Massachusetts in which EJ neighborhoods are facing existing health burdens.
Let's start with an overview of key terms. Scroll down and click EJ Criteria. The Massachusetts EJ policy defines EJ neighborhoods as U.S. census block groups that meet at least one of the criteria for income, community of color, and English isolation, as shown here.
Next click vulnerable health EJ criteria. Health criteria are used as a secondary screening step to identify EJ neighborhoods with existing health burdens. We refer to this subset of EJ neighborhoods as vulnerable health EJ neighborhoods. They meet at least one of the EJ criteria and at least one of the criteria for heart attacks, childhood blood lead levels, low birth weight or childhood asthma. Click any of these indicators to learn more.
And tool navigation is just a quick summary of all the different things you can do with the tool.
All right, let's get into the data. Click on EJ Data and Reports, and you'll see a map on the left showing which cities and towns meet EJ and vulnerable health EJ criteria. The table on the right gives us more specific information on which criteria are met for each community. Scroll down through the table to see the full list of cities and towns.
Clicking on the radio buttons provides more detailed information. For example, under EJ criteria, you can see the percent of population living in EJ neighborhoods for each town. Under the VH EJ criteria, you can see individual maps and tables of each of the four criteria.
Data can be downloaded into an Excel file by selecting the links at the bottom of any page. The Download Data Current View link will download data seen in the current data view. The Download Full Dataset link will download all data presented in the EJ Data and Reports section.
Clicking a specific city or town name will take you to the snapshot report. It shows community level demographic and health data for each criteria relative to the state. You can also download the Community Snapshot report as a PDF.
All right. That's the basics of the EJ data and reports. Now let's move on to the custom mapping feature.
Clicking this will redirect you to a new tab or window. The buffer selection tutorial here will help you create a buffer around a particular location. If, for example, you wanted to know if any EJ communities are within, say, a one-mile radius of a particular site.
Now let's get into custom mapping. To the left, you'll see multiple layers of data you can toggle on and off. You'll see that it shows which neighborhoods meet the EJ criteria. Type in an address here and the map will drop a pin you can zoom in on.
Click on the area and more information will appear in this window. Now, if you want to see if this selected area meets any of the vulnerable health criteria, scroll down to Vulnerable Health EJ by community and vulnerable health EJ by census tract. Okay, now click on the area again and you'll see tabs of information specific to this layer.
Let's look at another important layer. Say you wanted to know if this area is in close proximity to major facilities with air emissions. Just scroll down to Mass DEP major air and waste facilities. Toggle on the air operating permits layer and dots will appear representing their locations.
There are many other layers to explore that are important to EJ work, such as environmental and transit data layers.
We hope this tool is helpful in identifying communities vulnerable to environmental health inequities, and informing strategies that reduce environmental health burdens, enhance community planning, and guide outreach activities.