NASA Equity and Environmental Justice Program. Advancing Community Understanding and Use of Earth Observations to Help Advocate for Change.

Marginalized communities, particularly in the poorest and most vulnerable areas, bear the burden of increasing environmental challenges, including poor air and water quality, coastal flooding, and extreme heat. In August 2022, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) kicked off a new program to advance equity and environmental justice co-development in uses of Earth and social science. The new Equity and Environmental Justice (EEJ) Program—hosted as part of NASA’s Earth Sciences Division (ESD) Applied Sciences Program—is a commitment by the agency to ensure that the investment the nation has made in NASA satellites and science benefits people across the U.S. and helps them make informed decisions about the challenges they face in their communities.

The EEJ program supports a total of 39 projects that aim to advance progress on EEJ domestically through better understanding of community needs and increased use of Earth science, geospatial, and socioeconomic information. These projects include landscape analyses, community-based feasibility studies and data integration projects that address environmental injustices related to a range of themes, including food insecurity, green infrastructure, urban flooding, fire management, and climate hazards. The landscape analyses support characterization of EJ communities, the environmental issues they face, their familiarity/use of Earth observations (EO), and opportunities for working with them to support planning and investment decisions. The community-based feasibility studies address community needs by co-designing with community organizations projects tailored to community needs and test and validate use of EO for local decision making. Lastly, the data integration projects, culminate in GIS-enabled products or tools for public dissemination to support EEJ communities.

In this presentation, we discuss the EEJ program model and highlight examples of the various engagement strategies implemented in these projects to not only understand the EEJ “landscape”, but to support EJ communities with novel insights into community-level management through the integrated use of Earth science, geospatial, and socioeconomic data, tools, and applications. We will share preliminary lessons learned based on insights from our completed feasibility studies to allow us to connect and start a conversation with the AMS community about effective ways in which co-produced knowledge can amplify community efforts to advocate for change.