• 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 tools.

    At that point, efforts shifted to parties other than EPA. The open source 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 EJSCREEN Multisite Tool (EJAM). These are still in active development, but most of EJSCREEN’s features have already been restored. These efforts also have started to add new features in the multisite tool (EJAM), in an open source public, non-EPA version of the EJAM R package.

  • EJSCREEN reports now 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.

    • In February 2025, EJAM became 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 EPA’s EJSCREEN API), but that service is no longer available. The non-EPA version of EJSCREEN that launched in February provided certain types of Community Reports, through an initial “EJAM API” created in early 2025. The API helps EJSCREEN’s website request a report from EJAM. The initial non-EPA EJSCREEN/EJAM tools, from February through mid-October 2025, could provide only a limited Community Report:

      • The indicators initially were limited to the 13 environmental indicators, 9 demographic indicators (% low income, etc.), breakdown by race/ethnicity, gender, and language category in limited-English-speaking households.

      • Location types were very limited: The early 2025 EJSCREEN tool could report on a block group, but not a tract or county. It also could report on residents near a point, but not within a polygon from a shapefile.

    • In October & November 2025, significant improvements were rolled out, with greatly enhanced reports. EJAM version 2.32.6.003 was released, along with updates to EJSCREEN and the EJAM-API. The new reports added the following:

      • 1) tables with new columns and color-coding / “heat map” to clearly show which indicators are most elevated relative to US and State averages (as ratios),

      • 2) a barplot of 17 key indicators as ratios to the US average (and color-coded to show notable findings),

      • 3) a map of the location with information popup window, and

      • 4) new tables with many more of the indicators originally available in EPA’s EJSCREEN community reports. This new non-EPA version restored the following: Language spoken at home, health indicators (% with disabilities, low life expectancy, heart disease, asthma, cancer), % under 18, community metrics (life expectancy in years, per capita income, % owner occupied households, occupied housing units), % of households below poverty level, climate indicators (fire risk, flood risk), critical services (housing burden areas, food deserts, broadband internet, % without health insurance, transportation disadvantaged communities), features and locations information (numbers of NPL Superfund sites, hazardous waste treatment storage disposal facilities, toxic release facilities, brownfields, schools, hospitals, and overlaps with Tribal areas, non-attainment areas for air quality standards, CEJST disadvantaged communities, and EPA IRA disadvantaged communities, and more), and several other indicators (# of households, etc.).

    • The only features not yet restored from the pre-2025 EPA version of the Community Report are the following:

      • Averages and US/State percentiles for the health, climate, and critical service gaps indicators. The 10/2025 reports provide the values of these indicators in the analyzed location, but they are not compared to averages or percentiles.

      • Barplots of percentiles for EJ Indexes. The 10/2025 reports provide these percentiles in tables, not barplots.

      • Graphics showing small pie-chart-like visualizations of several demographic indicators (e.g., % low income). The 10/2025 reports provide these in tables.

  • 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 November 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.

    The ACS data for 2020-2024 are scheduled to be released by Census Bureau in early December 2025.

    Newer environmental indicator data also would typically have been released already in 2025, but that type of annual update relied on several different EPA datasets, some of which are no longer readily available from EPA.

    In addition to the ACS-based demographic indicators and the EPA-sourced environmental indicators, EJSCREEN provides many other variables related to health, climate, community characteristics, and more, derived from various sources. Those include CDC, USDA, NOAA, USGS, HHS, HUD, BLM, Census Bureau, First Street Foundation, and others, as documented in archived EJSCREEN technical documentation linked to here.