Environmental Public Health Tracking: Environmental Justice
Wisconsin Environmental Public Health Tracking provides information and data about environmental justice in Wisconsin.
Environmental justice is the principle that all people have the right to live in a clean, healthy environment and be protected from environmental pollution. Environmental exposures can lead to poor health. Throughout Wisconsin and the United States, the burden of these exposures falls disproportionately on people with low incomes and people of color. Exposure to environmental toxins contributes to unequal health outcomes among people of different socioeconomic status and race, such as higher chronic disease rates and lower than average birth weights. The same groups also bear an unfair burden of the effects of climate change.
Wisconsin Tracking makes data connected to environmental justice available by gathering information from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the CDC's (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) Geospatial Research, Analysis, and Service Program.
Explore the definitions and explanations of terminology found on this page, like age-adjusted rate and confidence intervals.
Click a topic below to view the data.
Click the "About Data" button in the upper right corner of the map to see CDC's details about these data.
Click the "About Data" button in the upper right corner of the map to see CDC's details about these data.
Click the "About Data" button in the upper right corner of the map to see CDC's details about these data.
Frequently asked questions
Tracking environmental justice data is important to help communities make decisions to achieve health equity. The national Tracking Network gathers data and information to make decisions about our environment and our health, including personal, community, regulatory, and public health decisions.
The Tracking Network allows users to identify demographic factors, environmental burdens, socioeconomic conditions, and public health concerns directly related to environmental justice. By understanding these data and tracking changes over time, we can make better decisions that reduce environmental injustice and better protect all communities.
CDC uses a variety of sources to create these maps. Please click the 'About Data' button at the top of each map to view the sources used to create them.
There are three key data points for tracking overall environmental justice. One of these key data points is called an index, and more than one are called indices. The three indices we track in Wisconsin are:
- The Environmental Justice Index (EJI) is the broadest measurement; it is calculated using the combined rankings of a location's environmental burden, social vulnerability, and health vulnerability. The EJI gives us a measure of the cumulative effects of environmental justice indicators on human health and well-being. The EJI ranking is easy to understand in terms of comparison. For example, if the number that you see when you select a county is .75, that means 75% of census tracts in the nation likely experience less severe impacts from environmental injustice than the area you selected. It also means 25% of tracts in the nation likely experience more severe effects.
- The Environmental Quality Index (EQI) gives a snapshot of the environment that includes five domain indices: air domain, built domain, land domain, sociodemographic domain, and water domain. A low index score indicates better, healthier environmental quality. Wisconsin's tracking data can either be viewed by looking at the overall EQI, or by each domain.
- The Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) refers to a community's resilience. It is a measure of how likely a community would be to survive and thrive if confronted with external stresses on human health, like disasters or disease outbreaks. SVI scores range from 0.00 to 1.00. A score of 1.00 represents the greatest level of social vulnerability to human suffering and financial loss in the event of an emergency. You can learn more about SVI on the CDC's website.
Environmental justice information and data are useful to anyone interested in working to build healthier communities. For ideas on how to start, visit our Ideas for Taking Action page. If you work in public health, government, science, research, or for a community organization, you can use environmental justice tracking data to:
- Identify areas that may require additional resources to improve environmental health and health equity,
- Characterize the unique environmental and social factors that can lead to combined effects of environmental burden on health,
- Inform policy and decision-making to address those factors, and
- Establish meaningful goals and measure progress towards environmental justice and health equity.
You can select data in the Wisconsin Tracking portal by county (or census tract in some cases), and this will give you an idea of conditions in your community. To see how your county compares with other counties, and with the national average, visit the CDC Environmental Justice Dashboard.