Updated Tool for Understanding Communities: PennEnviroScreen

By Justin Dula, AICP

Are you looking for a tool with Pennsylvania specific data to help understand and compare communities? The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) released the final Environmental Justice (EJ) Policy on January 3, 2026 and with this release comes an update of the PennEnviroScreen tool. By using PennEnviroScreen, planners can help better understand community demographics and burdens. This can be useful even beyond an explicit EJ context, as PennEnviroScreen is data-rich: it includes great amounts of of Pennsylvania specific data  Moreover, it makes comparisons between parts of Pennsylvania as opposed to national comparisons. The data is all publicly available for planners to use in custom applications as well.

• Have you ever been working on a grant application and wanted to put comparative numbers in your community needs statement?
• Have you been working on a public outreach plan and wondered if you needed to include language interpretation or translation services?
• Have you wanted to make a community comparison to another town in Pennsylvania, but aren’t sure which communities face similar issues?

The PennEnviroScreen tool can help in all these scenarios and more!

PennEnviroScreen quantifies and visualizes disproportionate environmental effects on vulnerable populations. PennEnviroScreen relies on two categories of 32 indicators. These indicators are broadly separated into Pollution Burden and Population Characteristics. All characteristics are converted to percentile scores based on Pennsylvania-specific data. The indicators are combined into a final PennEnviroScreen score, but each indicator is also available separately and often looking at individual indicator data is useful. All data is shown at the Census Block Group level across Pennsylvania, showing granular data that can help planners target specific projects within their city, township, or borough.

There are several ways planners can utilize this tool. Planners can get a better understanding of communities:

1. by visiting the PennEnviroScreen tool [https://gis.dep.pa.gov/PennEnviroScreen/].
2. by downloading DEP created data on the Department’s Open Data Portal for custom GIS applications.
3. by reviewing the PennEnviroScreen methodology to better understand the indicators, to find original data sources, and even to spur further planning questions.

PennEnviroScreen Tool

The native application allows for quite a few customized views and robust data analysis for planners who are looking to get a quick snapshot of data in their community. When you enter an address or municipality name in the search bar, the tool zooms to that point.  By clicking on the map, an “Identify Results” pane displays results for all of the layers that you have open. PennEnviroScreen also includes many reference layers to relate the Block Group data to county, municipal, school district, legislative, zip code, and other boundaries. This can help planners narrow in on areas of particular concern in the communities in which we work. By clicking on the highlight and zoom feature, you are taken to the extent of the area that is being described, be it census block group, municipality or more.

To get to the information from the use cases above, you can open particular layers to see more information. You can focus on those indicators where your community is seeing need to produce a need statement with percentile quantification for a grant application. You can identify linguistic isolation to see if there is a need for language translation or interpretation. You could also zoom back out to compare your community with others in Pennsylvania on any individual factor, be it asthma or abandoned mine sites.

Downloading PennEnviroScreen Data

For planners who have GIS capabilities and wish to produce custom maps, all of the layers created by DEP are available on the Department’s Open Data Portal. Planners can download the data and incorporate it into existing county or municipal mapping tools.

Original Data

For planners who want to dive very deeply into the original data sources, the PennEnviroScreen methodology talks about each indicator and links to the data source used. It also describes the rationale for including the data and potential future data sources to consider in future updates. Some of these sources may be available for your municipality!

As the landscape around environmental justice changes on the federal level, Pennsylvania DEP remains committed to supporting communities living in environmental justice areas. DEP is eager to work with the planning profession to help improve PennEnviroScreen in future iterations! The data itself does not point to possible actions that would decrease inequality.  But we have found in many contexts that the visibility of this kind of data can spur important dialogue about what solutions might exist. We are eager to learn from the planning profession about ideas or possibilities to create more just outcomes for people and communities. If you are using the tool and find it helpful, collecting case studies helps make the case for continued investment into PennEnviroScreen. If you have questions or suggestions, you can always enter them into the feedback button on the upper right of PennEnviroScreen, but also don’t hesitate to reach out the DEP Office of Environmental Justice team at RA-EPOEJ@pa.gov.