• EJSCREEN: The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released the first public version of EJSCREEN in 2015, as a web-based tool for environmental justice mapping and screening. It was an award-winning project that quickly grew into a widely-used tool. EJSCREEN provided a wealth of data — demographic and environmental indicators, combined into “EJ Indexes” — for all block groups in the United States. It allowed anyone with access to the internet to see maps of their neighborhood and the surrounding area. It also made it easy to see a report on any selected location, providing environmental indicators and socioeconomic/demographic data for local residents. It put these in perspective by comparing them to data on the whole State or the US overall.

  • EJAM: In 2024, a tool called EJAM added new capabilities. The Environmental Justice Analysis Multisite tool (EJAM) lets you easily and quickly see residential population and environmental information aggregated within and across hundreds or thousands of places, all at the same time.

  • EJSCREEN & EJAM work together

    EJSCREEN and EJAM are highly interconnected tools using the same data, while offering complementary strengths. EJSCREEN is widely recognized, excels in mapping, and offered many data layers. EJAM, on the other hand, was optimized to analyze lists of locations. EJAM can identify residential areas near certain kinds of EPA-regulated facilities (by industry type, facility ID, etc.) and excels at efficient number-crunching to analyze many locations all at once, as a whole and site-by-site. Each tool links to the other and they both use the same exact datasets.

  • Active development of public, non-EPA versions of EJSCREEN and EJAM

    In early February 2025, EPA took EJSCREEN and EJAM apps off line, with no plans to fund further development and maintenance of these software tools.

    At that point, efforts shifted to parties other than EPA. The open source (MIT license) code and data that had supported the tools allowed any interested parties the opportunity to pursue new collaborative efforts. A number of individuals and organizations (PEDP, EDGI, EPIC) have worked to create their own, public versions of an EJSCREEN web app and an EJAM web app. These are still in active development, but most of EJSCREEN’s features have already been restored as of 9/2025. These efforts also have started to add new features in EJAM, in an open source public, non-EPA version of the EJAM R package.

  • EJSCREEN reports come from EJAM

    In January 2025, EJAM was available to the public as a part of EJSCREEN. At that point, EJAM was called the “EJSCREEN Multisite Tool” because it creates multisite analysis and reports for EJSCREEN. A multisite report is just like a single-site community report, except it summarizes conditions at multiple locations as a whole.

    Since February 2025, EJAM is also the source of every single-site report, what EJSCREEN calls a “Community Report.” Prior to 2025 these were generated by an EPA map service (via the EJSCREEN API), but that service is no longer available.

    The non-EPA version of EJSCREEN that launched in February can provide certain types of Community Reports (as of mid/late 2025), through an initial “EJAM API” created in early 2025. The API helps EJSCREEN’s website request a report from EJAM. As that API develops, it will be able to recreate more of the full range of features that EJSCREEN’s Community Report had prior to 2025. For example, as of 9/2025, the non-EPA EJSCREEN app can report on a block group, but not a tract or county, so far. It can report on residents near a point, but not within a polygon from a shapefile, so far. EJAM can provide those other kinds of reports, and will enable EJSCREEN to do so, directly from the EJSCREEN tool, once the API is further developed.

  • Data Updates

    EPA last released an EJSCREEN update in August 2024, and since then the same datasets have been used in EJSCREEN and EJAM.

    As of September 2025, EJSCREEN 2.32 (& EJAM version 2.32.6) still use American Community Survey (ACS) data representing the five-year period of 2018-2022 (released by the Census Bureau 12/7/2023). The ACS data are the basis for block group resolution estimates of demographic and other data on residential populations and households. Census 2020 block population counts are used for the approximate distribution of residents within a given block group.

    Newer ACS data, for 2019-2023, would normally have been incorporated into EJSCREEN around mid-2025, but as of 9/2025 there are no plans yet for such an update.

    Newer environmental indicator data also would typically have been released already but that type of annual update relied on several different EPA datasets, some of which are no longer readily available from EPA.