The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Environmental Justice Index (EJI) ranks communities across the US according to environmental health risk. EJI is the first national geospatial tool to measure the cumulative impacts of social and environmental factors, including pre-existing chronic health conditions and built-environmental factors such as proximity to hazardous waste sites. State and local governments can turn to CDC’s EJI data to consider the equity of policy decisions and to prioritize spending.
EJI uses data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to rank the cumulative impacts of environmental injustice on health for every census tract. Census tracts are subdivisions of counties for which the Census collects statistical data. The EJI ranks each tract on 36 environmental, social, and health factors and groups them into three overarching modules and ten different domains.