MD EJSCREEN

Maryland residents’ knowledge of environmental hazards and their health effects is limited, partly due to the absence of tools to map and visualize distribution of risk factors across sociodemographic groups. The CEEJH team has worked in partnership with the National Center for Smart Growth, faculty at the School of Public Health, and the Maryland Environmental Health Network to develop an environmental justice screening tool for the state known as Maryland Environmental Justice Screen (MD EJSCREEN). This new screening tool will be a resource for identifying, visualizing, and analyzing areas with environmental justice concerns in the state of Maryland. The tool assesses environmental justice risks similarly to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (USEPA) EJSCREEN tool and California’s tool, CalEnviroScreen 3.0. MD EJSCREEN introduces EJ Scores—a percentile rank combining average pollution burden with average population demographic characteristics to compare with neighboring areas or county and state averages.  Click here to explore the tool. See our recent publication on MD EJSCREEN here.