About

The most disadvantaged Americans often face the worst environmental conditions, substantially reducing both health and lifespan. The Environmental Equity Atlas is an environmental policy tool designed and developed by Ty Pham-Swann, a student at Brown University, to demonstrate environmental justice issues and public health disparities through an impartial presentation of neighborhood-level data.

The map allows users to explore environmental health and socioeconomic data in their neighborhood at the census tract and county level. Please direct any questions or inquiries to ty_pham-swann@brown.edu. This project would not have been possible without the data aggregation effort by the Biden administration in creation of the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, research by Susanne Amelie Benz and Jennifer Anne Burney, data collection from numerous government agencies including the CDC, DOT, The U.S. Census, HUD, EPA, USACE, MLRC, CONUS, DOI, NLRC, HOLC, FEMA, DOE, work by The First Street Foundation, and work by Mapbox and OpenStreetMap. Template for this site from HTML5UP. The current version of this tool only contains data for states in the continental United States. Some states, counties, and census tracts will lack certain data layers. The views expressed in this policy tool are not reflective of The U.S. Census or any government agency whose data is presented.

The full repository for the web application is available at this repository; reach out individually for code used in data processing.

Methods Overview

Census tract level data was obtained from the aggregation of data by the Biden administration for the creation of the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool and from the study Benz and Burney (2021). To generate county data, an algorithm was used to find the average of the data value of census tracts in the county, weighted by population. This means that certain metrics such as percent of area covered by impervious surface or cropland is population-weighted at the county level, an intentional choice to convey the human effect of the metric. The current version of this tool only contains data for states in the continental United States. Some states, counties, and census tracts will lack certain data layers. The views expressed in this policy tool are not reflective of The U.S. Census or any government agency whose data is presented. Much of the data is from 2020 or 2019.

The methods for each individual layer can be found in the technical report: Open Report

Contact Me

Email

ty_pham-swann@brown.edu

LinkedIn

Other Work

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