Constructing Valid Geospatial Tools for Environmental Justice (2024) / Chapter Skim
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1 was developed in 2022 in response. Mapping and geographical information systems have been crucial for analyzing the environmental burdens of marginalized communities since the 1980s, and several federal and state geospatial tools have emerged to address a variety of environmental justice (EJ)
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On the basis of a review of existing EJ tools and the literature, through discussions with state and federal EJ tool developers and experts from the European Commission's Competence Centre on Composite Indicators and Scoreboards at the Joint Research Centre, and through a public workshop focused on community engagement,4 the committee developed its own conceptual framework for composite indicator and 4 Proceedings in Brief from the workshop are available at https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/27158/ representing-lived-experience-in-the-climate-and-economic-justice-screening-tool (accessed March 14, 2024)
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The outermost ring represents the objectives for constructing any tool, the innermost ring represents activities related to composite indicator construction, and the middle ring represents the communication activities necessary to move inside out. An EJ tool that measures cumulative impacts reflects the combined effects of environmental and socioeconomic burdens.
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DATA STRATEGY RECOMMENDATIONS Transparency implies that a tool's goals, processes, data, and uncertainties are recognized and understood by tool users and the people interested in tool results. The committee formulated a set of science-based recommendations to inform a data strategy for EJ tool development based on current research in geospatial tool development and EJ.
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Recommendation 1: Create and sustain community partnerships that provide forums and opportunities to identify local environmental justice issues, iden tify the indicators and datasets for measuring them, and determine whether tool results reflect community lived experiences. There is a spectrum of possible engagement approaches based on the desired level of involvement by community members and interested and affected parties.
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Less clear are the processes and rationale for decisions regarding indicator selection and weighting, data normalization, data treatments, thresholds, indicator aggregation, assessing statistical and conceptual coherence, epistemic uncertainty analysis, external validation via community engagement, and the design of the user interface. Thorough documentation of all tool components and approaches is vital to ensure proper tool use and to help decision makers understand where and how the tool may be accurate, what kinds of uncertainties should be expected, and when tool results need to be supplemented with other types of information.
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Because communities and burdens are dynamic, repeated validation of indicators and results is necessary. Recommendation 3: Validate tool development and evaluative processes throughout the construction of an environmental justice tool using approaches such as ground truthing, convergent validation, and community validation to ensure that the tool's indicators and results reflect lived experiences.
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The lack of explicit structure in CEJST linking the concept to be defined, its dimensions, indicators, and integration strategies results in an implicit weighting scheme. If CEQ incorporates more sophisticated indicator integration methods for capturing cumulative burdens in future iterations of CEJST, the lack of an explicit conceptual structure may be problematic.
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A single, uniform low-income measure in an EJ tool such as CEJST may not accurately reflect lived experiences, even after doubling the standard poverty level and accounting for the cost of living. Recommendation 6: Choose measures of economic burden beyond the fed eral poverty level that reflect lived experiences, attend to other dimensions of wealth, and consider geographic variations in cost of living.
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Tool developers can work with those who have developed other tools, representatives of communities of color, and technical experts to identify existing empirical data (see Recommendation 5) and consider whether and how well the metrics, quantitative data, and qualitative data reflect community lived experiences.
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A future CEQ data strategy could incorporate the use of an aggregated approach that allows combining indicators mathematically into a single number, thus capturing a representation of cumulative impacts. Decisions related to indicator selection, weighting, and aggregation to capture cumulative burdens are intertwined and should be made in an iterative and engaged manner, reflecting scientific knowledge, tenets of indicator construction, perspectives from interested and affected parties, and lived experiences.
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For example, to create a legitimate tool that represents lived experience, decisions regarding effective community engagement need to be made in consideration of how every component of composite indicator construction can be validated to determine if real-world conditions are being represented. Collaborative partnerships with community
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Data strategies based on cumulative impact scoring approaches are the state of the science and advanced practice and can reflect the combined effects of environmental and socioeconomic burdens over time in a manner that reflects reality. Implementing the recommendations in this report will allow the construction of valid geospatial tools for EJ that can inform better targeting of community investment.
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