Environmental justice burden
Where do environmental burdens and vulnerability stack up across Chicago? This map shows EPA EJScreen indicators for each community area — the EJ demographic index plus air quality, traffic, lead, and proximity to hazardous sites. Search your address or click any community area, and switch indicators with the tabs.
How to read this map
EPA EJScreen scores every census block group on environmental and demographic indicators. Each value here is a national percentile (0–100): a score of 90 means the area faces a heavier burden than 90% of the country. We show each community area as the area-weighted average of the block groups it covers, so a warmer color means a higher burden. The drawer reports how many block groups were averaged.
The EJ demographic index combines low-income and people-of-color shares — EPA’s measure of who is most affected. The environmental tabs (PM2.5, ozone, diesel, lead, traffic, and proximity to Superfund, chemical-accident, hazardous-waste, wastewater, and underground-storage sites) are the burdens themselves. Chicago sits high on the national scale across most of them — the story is where the heaviest burdens concentrate, from the industrial belts of the West and South Sides to the Calumet corridor on the Southeast Side.
Source: EPA EJScreen block-group indicators (v2.32, 2024 release), intersected with Census TIGER/Line block-group boundaries for Cook County. Air-toxics cancer and respiratory indices are omitted where EPA suppresses their national percentile. See methodology for details.