Find Environmental Justice Stories With Grants Data

A sunburst plot summarizing key terms for types of environmental justice grants, including environmental education, community workshops and training. Image: EDGI.

Reporter’s Toolbox: Find Environmental Justice Stories With Grants Data

By Joseph A. Davis

Environmental justice funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency may be over for now, but environmental injustice is still going strong.

Fortunately, there is a database for that.

 

The EPA under Trump 2.0

is clawing back its

environmental justice

grants, or trying to.

 

Of course, the EPA under Trump 2.0 is clawing back its environmental justice grants, or trying to. But thanks to the data rescuers at the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, we have the data itself.

You will find it in EDGI’s September report, “The Cost of Cuts to EPA’s Environmental Justice Grants” (the press release is here).

Fortunately, the four authors, Christopher Cane, Eric Nost, Manuel Salgado and Naomi Yoder, have done a lot of the analysis. So you don’t have to.

Because of their skills, though, they break Biden-era environmental justice grant data down to the county, census block and Congressional district level. So you can write local stories about it.

 

Where the data comes from

The data comes from a list of environmental justice grants (under various laws and programs) made by the EPA. You can find the raw data in spreadsheet form here. It is also available in geocoded form.

For the most part, the grants were funded under the two Biden-era megabills, the Inflation Reduction Act and the “Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.” That list amounted to some 510 individual grants.

There’s more to it than that. The painstaking construction of the final database is scrupulously documented in the excellent methodology section. From a quality perspective, this data is about as reliable as data can be.

It is worth noting that there have been a lot more environmental justice grants than just these. Since 1984, the EPA alone has made over 1,500 grants, most of them small. And of course, environmental justice grants of various kinds have been made by other federal and state agencies.

 

Using the data smartly

From a journalist’s perspective, the most alluring thing about the data is that it is coded by congressional districts (among other things). This allows you to put the grants (or the Trump administration’s clawback of them) in political context — which is what lies behind both the grants and the attempted cuts.

What the spreadsheet (good as it is) won’t give you — the texture, flavor and human stories of the particular kinds of injustices they are meant to remedy. Or the current status of those injustices. Or the degree to which the grants have succeeded. Or other, nongrant efforts to address each environmental justice problem.

 

The database gives you a

fine directory of sources

and organizations to

contact on the ground.

 

The good news is that the database gives you a fine directory of sources and organizations to contact on the ground.

You would also be wise to read the thoughtful and illuminating analysis in the 23-page report itself. Although this is at an overview (not local) level.

Although it may try, the Trump administration has not managed to kill all environmental justice efforts in the United States. Look to governments, nonprofits and local environmental justice groups for a fuller view of what is going on.

[Editor’s Note: For more, visit our environmental justice topic page, with more than three dozen SEJournal stories and environmental justice headlines from EJToday. Plus, see our regular Voices of Environmental Justice column.]

Joseph A. Davis is a freelance writer/editor in Washington, D.C. who has been writing about the environment since 1976. He writes SEJournal Online's TipSheet, Reporter's Toolbox and Issue Backgrounder, and curates SEJ's weekday news headlines service EJToday and @EJTodayNews. Davis also directs SEJ's Freedom of Information Project and writes the WatchDog opinion column.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 10, No. 39. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.