The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced a public meeting of the Science Advisory Board (SAB) Environmental Justice Screen (EJScreen) Review Panel (Panel) to discuss EPA's EJScreen methodology and updated calculations for the environmental justice indexes released publicly in October 2022. The meeting will be held May 8-10, 2023. The notice will be published in the Federal Register on April 19, 2023.
The SAB Panel last met on March 31, 2023, to receive a demonstration of EPA's EJScreen tool and begin discussion of the Panel's charge questions.
The Panel's charge questions include the following topics:
- scientific defensibility and logic of the EJScreen calculations
- technical accuracy of the EJScreen methodology
- recommendations on the demographic and environmental considerations in the EJScreen equations
- advice on the incorporation of cumulative impacts and scoring
- input on better consideration of rural geographies within EJScreen
In addition, the Panel will provide peer review of EPA's EJScreen tool. All meeting materials, including the agenda, will be available on the SAB webpage.
For those interested in EPA's EJScreen mapping tool, the Panel's three-day meeting will be an important development to follow.
