Encoding Justice with Data: Environmental Justice Screening Tools and the Limits of Quantification

This review examines government-sponsored environmental justice indices used in the United States, focusing on how their design choices operationalize justice. Rather than evaluating index outputs, we analyze their structural features, aggregation strategies, and underlying assumptions, and assess how they are used in peer-reviewed research between 2020 and 2025.

Across jurisdictions, indices show strong structural convergence, typically including exposure and vulnerability domains. Additive and multiplicative aggregation approaches encode different assumptions about how burdens interact, affecting community rankings and designations. Despite growing policy influence, indices are infrequently used as primary analytical tools in research. Procedural and recognitional dimensions remain weakly represented, and index construction is rarely examined explicitly. Environmental justice indices function not only as measurement tools but as governance mechanisms shaping eligibility and resource allocation. While effective for distributive screening, they represent partial definitions of justice and should be interpreted with caution within broader democratic and community-based frameworks.