Community Action for Equity and Environmental Justice

NASA data, information products, and knowledge can inform efforts to advance environmental justice, particularly for underserved and overburdened communities. In 2024, the NASA Equity and Environmental Justice (EEJ) Program hosted it’s second call for proposals for the creation of geospatial tools that integrate Earth science and socio-economic information to address environmental issues and inform action. Key aspects of this call were the focus on local solutions that can be replicated and scaled in other geographies, as well as the need to have a funded co-investigator involved in the co-design of the tool that is part of an underserved community. An Executive Order defines underserved communities as groups that have been systematically denied a full opportunity to participate in aspects of economic, social, and civic life.

In this talk, we will provide an overview of projects selected under our second call to highlight new ways of applying NASA Earth observations to support EEJ activities and their potential for high reward contributions to underserved communities. These projects address EEJ topics across a broad set of thematic areas, including climate, health and air quality, ecological conservation, disasters, agriculture, and water resources. We will also share the various processes being used to collaborate with undeserved and overburdened communities. These include direct and meaningful community engagement and assessment of user requirements as the foundation that informs the design of the end products, as well as community consultation activities for tool design, testing and implementation. We will also highlight capacity building efforts being used to raise awareness of, access to, and ability to use the tools created within the underserved communities.

Lastly, we will also highlight results from projects that begun in late 2022 and early 2023 as part of our first NASA EEJ call for proposals in 2021. These projects have increased NASA’s understanding of the EEJ “landscape” helping to characterize EJ communities’ priorities, environmental issues being faced, familiarity of communities with Earth observations, and opportunities to engage. We will summarize some of the novel insights and recommendations from these projects, ranging from recommendations for how NASA data and tools can empower community members to advocate for better land-use decisions that address their exposure to natural disasters to how to improve existing tools to reduce current barriers that make it difficult for communities to adopt new technologies.