Screenshot of the error message for the Council on Environmental Quality’s CEJST web tool
By Kelly Wilkins-Steinrueck, Eric Nost, Gretchen Gehrke, and EDGI
Last week the Trump administration removed access to the Council on Environmental Quality’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST). The public web tool allowed users to see on a map which places in the US face marginalization and disproportionate climate and pollution burdens.
Less than three days after CEJST was taken offline, EDGI and fellow members of Public Environmental Data Partners (PEDP) stood up an unofficial but functional copy, restoring public access.
Administrations can cut off public access to CEJST, environmental datasets, and other web resources because our federal information policies don’t prevent this. An administration seeking to disregard environmental and societal injustices can simply hide or remove inconvenient data and information.
Because of this, and because of the widespread information suppression we documented under the first Trump administration, EDGI anticipated the targeting of federal environmental and climate data after Trump’s inauguration. For this reason we’ve been coordinating a large-scale data preservation effort since November, archiving datasets and preparing to rebuild public access to web tools.
Like other federal environmental tools, CEJST, which came out of the Biden-era environmental justice initiative Justice40, has its limitations. It doesn’t incorporate measures of race or racism. It also doesn’t directly indicate who’s to blame for disproportionate climate and pollution burdens. However it was a critical resource for environmental justice groups working to direct federal funding to impacted communities, and dozens of groups reached out to us asking that we prioritize saving it.
Now that public access is restored, our longer term goals include working together with our coalition and impacted communities to build better, more interoperable, more accessible, and more justice-centered tools for a range of federal data.