The Sierra Club and three other environmental groups are suing the Trump administration for removing these online tools, arguing they are vital for protecting communities from environmental risks. (Credit: freshidea/Adobe Stock)
(Bloomberg) — The White House effort to scrub government websites of environmental data has researchers and activists trying to recreate several lost mapping tools to protect communities vulnerable to pollution and climate change.
One of them pinpointed existing air and water pollutant risks nationwide, for example. Another mapped low-income areas facing high energy costs, while a third showed the location and costs of future climate threats. Government officials, academics and activists used that data for everything from studying environmental harms at the local level to funneling money to help those communities protect themselves against those threats.
Without them, users say it’s harder and more time-consuming to do community organizing, grant writing and other work. Removing these public mapping tools “is actually dumbing down the way the government works,” says Robert Verchick, a climate legal expert at Loyola University.
The White House, along with several of the federal agencies that hosted the resources on their websites, declined requests for comment. The Environmental Protection Agency said it took down an environmental threat tracker to comply with President Donald Trump’s mandate to end the federal government’s work on diversity, equity and inclusion, which the White House has described as "immense public waste and shameful discrimination."
“EPA is working to diligently implement President Trump’s executive orders, including the ‘Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,’ as well as subsequent associated implementation memos,” an agency spokesperson said.
The Sierra Club and three other environmental groups are suing the Trump administration for removing these online tools, arguing they are vital for protecting communities from environmental risks. While the case plays out in court — the judge overseeing the case hasn’t issued any rulings — a coalition of volunteer researchers and organizations called the Public Environmental Data Partners has been trying to recreate some of the deleted tools. Decades of work has gone into making these tools and their underlying analysis, says Naomi Yoder, a data scientist working on the project. “We do our best and are providing a stop-gap measure,” they said.
Here are the tools the Trump Administration has taken down and what they were used for:
Environmental justice mapping
The Environmental Protection Agency’s EJScreen let users look up areas exposed to different environmental hazards, with data on air pollution, wastewater discharge and a proxy for lead-based paint exposure, and identify the most vulnerable groups of residents living nearby, such as young children or low-income families.
EJScreen started as an internal agency tool to help identify communities disproportionately harmed by environmental threats for further study and support and was publicly released in 2015. It had been updated regularly until the Trump administration took it down earlier this year, with EPA officials citing Trump’s executive orders as the reason for doing so.
When helping respond on the ground to wildfires or other disasters pre-Trump, for example, EPA officials used EJScreen to understand affected communities and how best to communicate with them about the response, recovery and cleanup.
The tool has also been critical for outside groups working with the government or trying to raise awareness. The Sierra Club, for example, has used it over the years to boost its research and public reports on environmental projects and risks, as well as to help provide public comments and testimonies to government officials about such projects.
Verchick said he has used the tool in his environmental law classes, including one showing communities possibly polluted by sewage overflowing into Georgia’s South River.
Researchers and advocates can consult an almost full version of EJScreen that Public Environmental Data Partners was able to recreate despite source code not being available, says Yoder.
Charting future climate risk
The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Future Risk Index is a first-of-its-kind, freely available tool for mapping how much climate-linked hazards — coastal flooding, drought, extreme heat, hurricanes and wildfires — could cost under different global warming scenarios down to the county level.
By mid-century, under the lower emissions scenario embedded in the tool, Florida’s Miami-Dade County could face an estimated $191 million in annual losses from hurricanes; California’s Los Angeles County could face an estimated $49.5 million in wildfire losses, and Nevada’s Clark County, home to Las Vegas, could face $17.5 million in losses from extreme heat, according to the tool, launched last December.
This data was meant to be used to inform community resiliency and emergency management planning.
Soon after taking office, the Trump administration took down the tool and websites relating to it. The agency declined to comment on the removal citing pending litigation. Meanwhile, the data company Fulton Ring, Inc. recreated a public version of it.
Matching funds to at-risk communities
The Biden administration established the Justice40 Initiative, a federal program designed to funnel at least 40% of the total benefits from government spending on climate, clean energy and other projects into disadvantaged communities. The White House’s Council on Environmental Quality developed the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, and one of its key uses was identifying disadvantaged communities nationwide. For example, it was a resource for communities applying for federal grants through the Inflation Reduction Act or Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to make the case that they qualified as a disadvantaged community, according to Yoder. This made it “an important advocacy tool” for getting money to these communities, they say.
The White House, which did not respond to a request for comment, took down the tool in late January as part of a larger effort to roll back federal environmental justice work and personnel. It was the first tool that Public Environmental Data Partners salvaged in Trump’s second term, Yoder says, and the replicated version is available here.
Spreading the benefits of government-funded projects and lowering electric bills
Biden’s Department of Energy launched a program to ensure new big energy infrastructure projects funded through the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law would directly benefit local residents. Here’s how it worked: Companies developing project proposals had to include a “community benefits plan,” highlighting what nearby communities could expect to gain as well as detailing how the community could provide input and engage in the project development process.
The agency’s Community Benefits Plan Map provided an up-to-date database of these projects and included links for details on the community benefit commitments when available, explains Iliana Paul, deputy director of the Sierra Club’s Industrial Transformation campaign. It wasn’t “just a database or interactive map to learn more about a project,” she says, but was also a “powerful organizing tool” that enabled advocacy groups to find and help the communities tied to these projects, as well as for communities to self-identify and connect with each other.
The Trump administration, which removed the map and related websites in late January, did not respond to a request for comment. Some of the information is archived online on the Wayback Machine, a site of the San Francisco-based nonprofit the Internet Archive. It’s unclear if all of the proposed infrastructure projects will go forward, and if they do, whether the existing benefit plans will even be used, Paul says.
Trump’s Energy Department also removed another tool called the Low-Income Energy Affordability Data Tool. It mapped what’s called “energy burden,” or the cost of energy relative to income, across US cities, counties, states and tribal lands. The Sierra Club has used the tool to spotlight certain low-income communities experiencing disproportionately high electric bills, including to help write its recent St. Louis Burden Report released in January. This tool is also at least partially archived on the Wayback Machine, which works by saving snapshots of webpages identified by web users and is not designed to fully capture the complexity of interactive online platforms with multiple data layers.
Improving public transit
Another Biden-era mapping tool with an environmental justice bent, the Department of Transportation’s Equitable Transportation Community Explorer helped identify communities experiencing underinvestment in transportation. The Sierra Club had used the tool in its work encouraging municipalities to better advertise their existing green spaces and to promote legislation to improve public transportation between underserved communities and trails, parks and other public lands. Trump’s Transportation Department, which took down the map earlier this year, did not respond to a request for comment. The tool’s old homepage can be found archived on the Wayback Machine.
See also:
- How the insurance industry can take the lead in climate resilience
- France warns of soaring insurance costs from climate change
- Insurance industry can find economic opportunity in climate change
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