Combating Trump administration threat to environmental justice data: A progress report

The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) was formed in November 2016 to respond to the threat posed by the new Trump Administration to environmental data, environmental policies, and federal environmental agencies. EDGI needs to move beyond its largely reactive approach of documenting, monitoring, and analyzing environmental data and related federal websites and instead take a more proactive role in preserving environmental justice data. Members of EDGI report on the activities, goals, and accomplishments of the Initiative and propose a forward-looking research agenda based on greater public access to environmental data supported by an open source online infrastructure in the current issue of Environmental Justice.

In the article entitled "Environmental Data Justice and the Trump Administration: Reflections from Environmental Data and Governance Initiative," coauthors Lindsey Dillon and colleagues from University of California, Santa Cruz, University of Toronto (Canada), Chemical Heritage Foundation (Philadelphia, PA), Northeastern University (Boston, MA), and Indiana University (Bloomington, IN) describe the ongoing actions by the Trump Administration that limit public access to scientific data and educational information about environmental risks, industrial emissions, climate issues, and related topics. The authors discuss the research projects and practices developed by EDGI, which aim to preserve environmental justice data that is in the public interest and to monitor and analyze the changing federal landscape. Additionally, they present a vision for how EDGI should move forward to advance environmental justice data.

"Having all the environmental facts can impact the lives of thousands if not more over generations in documented geographies of environmental injustice," says Environmental Justice Editor-in-Chief Sylvia Hood Washington, PhD, MSE, MPH, and a LEED AP, and Sustainability Director, Environmental Health Research Associates, LLC. "NGOs should shift their paradigm to protect the lives of these communities by being proactive in obtaining all the facts that can mitigate current and future environmental health disparities."