38 On the EJI Explorer’s map, DeKalb County, Georgia, where McKenzie lives, census tracts show up as various shapes in shades of blue, with some noticeable clusters. He clicks on one community, for example, a tract in Northern DeKalb County in a deep blue with a score of 0.9. This means that the tract likely experiences more severe cumulative impacts on health than 90 percent of all other tracts in the nation. “What’s more important,” McKenzie said, “is that you can click on an individual community, and you can actually see what is driving those impacts.” Crucially, the tool lets users view the map and its score through each of the 36 individual indicators, including factors such as proximity to highways, the prevalence of chronic disease, and lack of health insurance. This information is critical because it makes the tool flexible enough to answer a variety of general or specific questions without having to use a separate index. Links on a separate page lead to the underlying raw data resources used to create the index. These originate from the CDC, the Census Bureau, the EPA, and the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Zooming In on Unequal Impacts For years, public health professionals have explored these factors through portals such as the EPA’s EJScreen or California’s CalEnviroScreen or the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index (SVI). But the EJI’s single cumulative score can more easily illustrate patterns of impacts in ways that represent the complex relationships of a particular community’s mix of stressors. “Those [dark-blue tracts] are areas that people can look at and start to focus on at a very high level,” McKenzie said. “That’s valuable for high-level context and comparison.” He offers the example of two similar-sized communities with similar levels of air pollution. “In one community, you have people who can afford expensive air filters, medical treatment, medical care; they have access to insurance,” McKenzie said. In a lower-income community, McKenzie added, “People don’t have the same level of access to insurance, and a lot of people might already have underlying medical conditions.” The two communities with similar levels of air pollution may have the same levels of truck traffic, he said, “but one of them is going to end up having more extreme health effects.” McKenzie said the EJI, like the SVI, is already helping some CDC researchers answer basic questions at the outset of public health emergencies. The tool is also helping inform other efforts at HHS, which have made health equity a priority in various regulatory This tract in DeKalb County, Georgia, with an EJI rank of 0.7, likely experiences more severe cumulative impacts on health than 70 percent of all other tracts in the nation. EJI Explorer panel for the Wilmington neighborhood in Los Angeles shows high readings for air pollution.
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