This analysis identifies priority areas for community solar development by mapping environmental justice communities across the United States using EPA’s EJScreen tool. EJScreen is an environmental justice mapping and screening tool that provides a nationally consistent dataset and approach for combining environmental and demographic indicators.
The goal of this analysis is to support equitable clean energy deployment by highlighting communities that face disproportionate environmental burdens and could benefit most from community solar programs.
Community solar has significant potential to advance climate equity, but it currently fails to reach the communities most burdened by pollution and energy costs due to structural, financial, and behavioral barriers. EJScreen serves as a screening tool to identify areas that may need further attention, and should be used alongside community input and additional analysis for community solar deployment decisions.
A copy of EJScreen, hosted by Public Environmental Data Partners, can be accessed here.
EPA’s EJScreen Demographic Index 2 is based on the average of the Z-score values of the two socioeconomic indicators: percent low income and percent people of color.
Census block groups scoring at or above the 90th percentile on the Demographic Index 2 were classified as environmental justice communities, representing areas where residents face the highest combined burden of low income and minority status. Block group data was aggregated to state and county levels to identify areas with the largest concentrations of people living in qualifying environmental justice communities.
Table 1 presents a view of environmental justice communities across all 50 states (and Washington, D.C.), ranking them by total EJ population. The data reveals significant variation in both absolute numbers and percentages of EJ populations. California leads with over 5.4 million people living in EJ communities (13.83% of the state’s population), followed by Texas with 3.6 million (12.47%). Notably, New Mexico shows the highest percentage of EJ population at 26.33%, despite having a smaller absolute number.
The national map visualizes the geographic concentration of environmental justice communities, using a color-coded system where darker shades indicate higher percentages of EJ populations relative to total state populations. The map clearly shows pronounced clusters in the Southwest (particularly New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada), parts of the Southeast, California, and Texas. This spatial analysis reveals that environmental justice issues are not uniformly distributed but tend to concentrate in specific regions, often correlating with industrial activity, historical patterns of development, and demographic factors.