National Law Review: “Two recent actions by the Biden Administration will identify areas of focus for environmental justice (EJ) and therefore influence environmental enforcement priorities, federal permitting and licensing, and federal spending, among other actions. On February 18, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) released the beta (or draft) version of its Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), a key component of President Biden’s Justice40 Initiative and mandated by the same Executive Order 14008. As we described last year, the Justice40 Initiative set the goal of “delivering 40 percent of the overall benefits of relevant federal investments” to disadvantaged communities. The CEJST serves a specific purpose: to help agencies identify disadvantaged communities in order to direct federal benefits and help agencies measure whether 40 percent of benefits are being received by those communities. In sum, CEJST is a map and accompanying list of disadvantaged communities in the US, as determined by eight categories of disadvantaged status indices. In general, CEJST uses a baseline of low-income and low higher education enrollment rate plus at least one other burden listed in a category to determine disadvantaged status. CEQ is now soliciting feedback on the CEJST and has published a lengthy draft spreadsheet of disadvantaged communities. Also last Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released EJSCREEN 2.0, an update to its EJSCREEN 1.0—a tool widely used by federal and state agencies for a broad array of screenings, outreach, and analyses. EJSCREEN 2.0 includes new environmental justice indices, such as an underground storage tank indicator and an unemployment indicator, as well as updated environmental and demographic data down to the block group level (i.e., about every 1200 persons)…”