EJScreen went dark.
Your environmental justice work didn't have to.

EPA discontinued public access to EJScreen on February 5, 2025. The underlying datasets (EPA AirToxScreen, ACS demographics, environmental indicators) still exist, but the public mapping interface most agencies, consultants, and community groups relied on is no longer hosted by EPA. A community-maintained copy of the tool is available at screening-tools.com, and Harvard EELP has documented the discontinuation in its environmental policy tracker.

EJScreen was the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's environmental justice screening and mapping tool. It combined twelve environmental indicators (air toxics cancer risk, particulate matter, ozone, proximity to hazardous waste sites, and others) with demographic indicators (low-income population share, minority population share, limited English proficiency, and similar) at the census-tract level. Agencies, consultants, and community groups used it to identify places that may have higher environmental burdens and more vulnerable populations.

The raw EPA AirToxScreen and ACS datasets remain publicly available through EPA and the Census Bureau. A community-maintained copy of the EJScreen interface lives at screening-tools.com. CalEnviroScreen, run by CalEPA, is still active for California work. None of these are full replacements for production permit or HRA workflows, which is the gap LSARS fills.

For census-tract screening only, the third-party screening-tools.com host of EJScreen 2.3 and CalEnviroScreen are reasonable free options. For production work that needs facility-level health risk assessment, audit trails, and permit-grade calculations, free screening tools were never designed for that load. LSARS is paid software built for the latter use case.

EJScreen was a screening and mapping tool. LSARS uses the same underlying EPA AirToxScreen 2020 air toxics data and the same demographic and SDOH overlays (CDC SVI 2022 and ACS 2023), then adds permit-grade health risk assessment math on top. That includes Maximum Exposed Individual Risk (MEIR), Population-Weighted Metric (PMI), Hazard Index (HI), and HEM reports, validated against CARB HARP2 to five significant figures. EJScreen could tell you which census tracts had higher environmental burdens. LSARS can also tell you what a specific facility contributes and what the resulting health and financial burden looks like.

Yes. LSARS implements both EPA methodology and CA-OEHHA 2015 methodology with Age Sensitivity Factors, which are the methods CARB requires for AB2588 Hot Spots reporting and that lead agencies expect for CEQA Health Risk Assessments. The HRA engine is parity-validated against HARP2 to five significant figures, so calculations reproduce what air districts and OEHHA reviewers expect to see.

LSARS bundles CDC Social Vulnerability Index 2022 and American Community Survey 2023 demographic data at the census-tract level for all 50 states. These are the same upstream sources EJScreen used for its demographic and supplemental indicators. LSARS treats these layers as a first-class part of every health risk calculation, so SDOH context shows up alongside the cancer risk and hazard index numbers, not as a separate map view.

LSARS does not replace EPA or CARB methodology. It implements those agencies' methodologies and is parity-validated against the official CARB HARP2 software to five significant figures (10 to the negative 4 precision). For regulatory submissions, the responsible facility, consultant, or agency is always the entity of record, and LSARS provides the auditable calculation trail that supports the submission.