How a New Mapping Tool Is Guiding New York City Toward Environmental Justice

A years-long effort to increase access to environmental justice for all New Yorkers across the city now has the information to take targeted actions, thanks to a new report and mapping tool.

The EJNYC (Environmental Justice New York City) Mapping Tool brings together over 100 layers of data on environmental and health burdens and benefits—data that’s often siloed—to help illustrate how factors such as historical housing discrimination intersect with present-day environmental injustices.

The map portal and report—the first of their kind in the US—are part of a push to bring a wealth of open data to bear on disproportionate environmental burdens and climate risks. This will empower government agencies and community-based groups to better target their environmental justice efforts.

Built on top of a geographic information system, or GIS, the mapping tool benefits from map-based data and builds on a number of pioneering geospatial apps the city and federal governments have created to help communities and policymakers pinpoint environmental, social, and health vulnerabilities at the level of a neighborhood—and sometimes a city block.

Addressing a Citywide Issue Starts at the Neighborhood Scale

To start tackling one of the biggest challenges facing New York, you can learn a lot by looking at the trees.

During the sweltering summer days that are becoming more common, congested streets without tree cover can feel up to 20 degrees hotter. And across the city, the streets with the least tree shade are overwhelmingly in the most environmentally burdened neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are already prone to higher asthma and hospitalization rates, and are home to disproportionate numbers of Black New Yorkers, who are twice as likely as white residents to die from the effects of extreme heat. Trees do more than address extreme heat. They provide a vital co-benefit of improving air quality.

The risks add up quickly, and the troubling relationships behind them aren’t always apparent. The compounding dangers come into focus on the EJNYC Mapping Tool.

“New York has recently been classified as a humid, subtropical climate, which has led to hotter and wetter summers,” said Paul Lozito, deputy executive director of the NYC Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice, which helped produce the EJNYC tool and report. “We have seen that across the city in recent heatwaves. In addition to fountains and parks mapped in the EJNYC Mapping Tool, we know that something as simple as the shade of a tree can provide five degrees or more of relief. As evidenced in our EJNYC Mapping Tool, EJ [environmental justice] areas have a higher heat vulnerability and lower tree cover.”

According to Lozito, the EJNYC Report provides an opportunity to use that information to address that disparity. “An example of that is our current NYC Parks initiative to prioritize tree planting in high heat vulnerability neighborhoods,” he said.

Individually, the environmental risks and benefits in those and other neighborhoods may not be surprising. “But add them up,” he said, and “the cumulative impacts illustrated by the mapping tool are stark.”

Focusing on Resilience to Climate Change Pressures

Since Hurricane Sandy rocked the city in 2012, killing 44 people and leaving behind billions in damages, the city has worked to protect New Yorkers from coastal flooding and other growing climate and environmental risks. As part of a landmark open data initiative, the city has also built public databases and maps focused on the environment, complementing a wealth of state and federal data tools focused on pollution and climate.

Now, to develop better policies and more equitably allocate resources, officials and community leaders are focusing on the many not-so-visible factors that intersect with those risks, including income levels, race, and access to parks and healthy food. The EJNYC Mapping Tool and Report—part of the city’s first comprehensive study of environmental justice—are intended to surface those intersections, pulling data out of separate silos, and tying the risks together to show where the cumulative impacts hit New Yorkers the hardest.

In addition to providing much needed data to local community groups, Lozito said the mapping tool will help city agencies make more efficient spending decisions that address climate harms, especially at a time when budgets are under pressure. And it will help officials meet the city’s climate budget mandate that took effect in April 2024—New York was the first major city in the US to consider climate impacts when prioritizing funding.

The map and report, shared Lozito, are intended to augment the city’s existing environmental justice efforts, a “piece of the puzzle that we will use as we are designing infrastructure, policies, procedures, and programs to address these harms.”

Taking the Tools to Communities to Take Action

EJNYC was first mandated by the New York City Council in 2017 to advance environmental justice. Now, with the report and mapping tool in hand, an advisory board composed of environmental justice advocates and local experts will lead discussions with community representatives about their findings. The Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice, the EJ Advisory Board, and an interagency task force will develop the EJNYC Plan, aimed at improving existing processes, implementing new policies, and more fairly allocating resources.

The mapping tool could also boost a local all-hands-on-deck effort across the city to tap into billions in federal funds made available through the Biden administration’s Justice40 initiative that calls for distributing 40 percent of its historic climate, clean energy, and infrastructure investments to disadvantaged communities.

“We have the opportunity, with all of the information we have, to tailor our asks of the federal government, to make sure that we identify and highlight and amplify the needs in EJ communities,” Lozito said.

The EJNYC Mapping Tool complements a number of federal efforts to put environmental justice on the map. Tools such as the Environmental Protection Agency’s EJScreen and the Environmental Justice Index, built by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Health and Human Services, evaluate communities across the US according to their environmental health risk. In 2021, the White House Council on Environmental Quality released its own geospatial portal, the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), to help identify communities eligible for Justice40 funding.

The maps show what many environmental justice advocates have long known about what links the places that are most vulnerable to environmental risks: They are of lower income, often speak English as a second language, and face histories of industrial pollution and the discriminatory housing practice known as redlining (also called “revision”).

“I think that the city broadly was aware of these issues and has been working for some time to address them,” Lozito said. “My takeaway is the number of compounding issues that the report reveals.”

Visualizing Intersections of Race and Environmental Hazards

With the EJNYC Mapping Tool, users can choose from a whopping 105 individual layers of data on environmental hazards and benefits. Select any layer on the right side—for instance, ozone, truck traffic, and green space—and you can start to discover where these effects can combine to produce a perfect storm of harm. Alternatively, buttons on the left-hand side allow you to filter the layers according to six themes: access to resources, exposure to polluted air, exposure to hazardous materials, access to safe and healthy housing, exposure to polluted water, and exposure to climate change.

As the map shows:

• EJ Areas comprise 44 percent of all New York City census tracts and 49 percent of its population, with residents who are predominantly Hispanic or Latino (43 percent, compared to 29 percent citywide) and Black (27 percent, compared to 21 percent citywide).
• EJ areas contain more stationary sources of pollution, more observed health disparities, and greater exposure to potential flooding and emissions. For instance, 68 percent of existing and planned last-mile distribution centers or e-commerce facilities are also located in EJ communities.
• The impact of racially discriminatory real estate practices persists. 67 percent of the total population in New York City’s historically revised areas—who are disproportionately Black and Hispanic or Latino—live in EJ areas today, compared to 49 percent of the total city population. Previous research has linked redlining to many environmental and health disparities. You can observe these relationships on the map too: A dataset from the University of Richmond illustrates those neighborhoods that were historically redlined.

“That historical connection is really important to make the argument for why targeted investment and action is necessary,” said Sarah Smyth, a senior consultant at Buro Happold, the engineering and advisory firm that helped develop the report and mapping tool. “Because these things just don’t go away.”

Discussions with community members about their lived experiences helped the EJNYC team address head-on some of the unavoidable limitations of quantitative data, and the conflicts that can arise as a result.

“If you’re going to say that there’s an area with a particular kind of environmental harm, you need to understand what informs that,” Lozito said. “Looking at our air quality monitors validates why one community member might think that there’s an issue here.”

Meeting the Urgency of the Moment

Lozito expects the EJNYC Mapping Tool and EJNYC Report will help the city integrate environmental justice into all levels of decision-making. For instance, as the city seeks to address the risks of deadly heat—much as it has sought to do with coastal communities facing rising flood risks—the map could inform where to set up new cooling centers, provide air conditioning units, or fund longer term resilience efforts, such as renovating buildings built for a colder climate.

“We are now having real conversations about how to address extreme heat with buildings that are well-insulated in brick,” Lozito said.

The map is also poised to help inform local efforts to apply for federal funding and lobby for new policies. WE ACT for Environmental Justice, based in Harlem, opened a center last fall to help nonprofit organizations apply for money from the federal Inflation Reduction Act, where grant writers can get advice on developing funding proposals.

At a launch event in April, Peggy Shepard, the executive director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice and chair of the advisory board, described the new report and interactive tool as a “milestone moment” for environmental justice in the city.

“When I first started campaigning for environmental justice 36 years ago, one of our goals was to ensure that environmental justice was on the city’s agenda, that our leaders understood the disproportionate burdens that our communities face, and that that they would be willing to work together toward equitable solutions to really address those disparities,” she said. “We’re all eager to enter the next phase, which is developing a comprehensive citywide plan to address the environmental justice issues that are identified in the report.”

Learn more about how GIS is used to advance racial equity and social and environmental justice.

View a video tour of EJNYC below.