Advocates’ Equity Tool Adds Race to Help Near-Miss Communities

Environmental justice advocates have built their own tool adding race as a factor in locating disadvantaged communities, which could help communities that narrowly fail to meet the cutoff for attention under President Joe Biden’s Justice40 environmental equity effort.

The tool is to be used by communities to supplement the Biden administration’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, released last fall to help federal agencies pinpoint communities suffering from pollution for decades and getting too little government attention.

Advocates criticized Biden’s Council on Environmental Quality for excluding race as a key factor in its tool and have added the metric in ...