39 Equity and Social Justice initiatives. In October 2023, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services incorporated several equity measures in its payment rules for Medicare, hospitals, and nursing facilities. The agency also advises that the EJI can be used to achieve Justice40 goals, along with tools such as the White House’s CMRA portal and Climate Economic Justice Screening Tool and its associated data layers, to pinpoint and prioritize disadvantaged communities for environmental justice programs. The EJI is already being used at the local level, too. In Cook County, Illinois, officials are using the map to help prioritize support for suburban municipalities in developing its Climate Resiliency Plans. Under the program, priority is given to communities that experience the most severe cumulative impacts to health and may have the fewest resources to build climate resilience. I think as a nation, we started to realize that environmental justice is absolutely critical to achieving health equity. So much of our health is impacted by contextual considerations. —Benjamin McKenzie, Project Coordinator for the EJI The COVID-19 pandemic only brought those factors into sharper relief. “That definitely brought more attention to the fact that we need to be addressing those disparities,” he said. Realizing the Impacts around Manhattan In early 2023, McKenzie and his team held community workshops to share ideas on how to use the tool and gather local feedback that can help improve the index. More than 900 people have registered so far, says the CDC, and since the EJI went public in August 2022, the website received more than 110,000 site visits in the first year. “We’ve definitely seen people who just hadn’t thought about the fact that social factors or health factors might play a role in how the environment affects their health,” McKenzie said. The EJI has put new investment on the map. In New York City, Levine and a chorus of local leaders and community members pointed to the air quality risk from MTA’s congestion pricing plan, especially on already-burdened communities. The MTA told the federal government that it would spend tens of millions to mitigate those impacts in the Bronx and elsewhere. Those efforts helped bring the mitigation plan over the finish line: In late June 2022, final approval was granted by the Federal Highway Administration giving MTA a green light to start the program as early as May 2024. The scenario may still face headwinds: a lawsuit filed by the state of New Jersey in July 2023 warns of similarly increased pollution impacts on Bergen County and notes that although the MTA has proposed $130 million in mitigation efforts for increased congestion in the Bronx, it has offered none for New Jersey. For McKenzie, the MTA’s moves and a growing conversation around environmental justice underscore the value of tools such as the EJI and show why it’s critical to find even better ways to highlight places on the map that have long been forgotten. “Advocates can now use this data to point to that and to say, ‘This is a community that deserves attention,’” McKenzie concluded. The neighborhood around the Gowanus Canal ranks high in the EJI for its environmental burden and social vulnerability.
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