Environmental justice is not an abstract principle. It is a measurable reality that can be quantified, mapped, and addressed through data-driven policy and investment. Today, TerraFuture is releasing our Environmental Justice Index for the Portland metropolitan area, a comprehensive tool that combines 23 environmental and socioeconomic indicators at the census tract level to identify communities facing disproportionate environmental burdens.
The data confirms what affected communities have long known: environmental harm in Portland is distributed along lines of race and income with striking consistency.
Building the Index
Our Environmental Justice Index integrates data from 14 different sources, including the EPA's EJScreen tool, Oregon DEQ monitoring data, the US Census Bureau, Portland's Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, and TerraFuture's own monitoring networks. The 23 indicators fall into four categories.
Environmental exposure indicators include particulate matter concentrations, proximity to hazardous waste sites, traffic density, industrial facility emissions, drinking water quality violations, and urban heat island intensity. There are eight indicators in this category.
Environmental amenity indicators measure access to parks, tree canopy coverage, access to fresh food, and proximity to green infrastructure. Six indicators capture what communities have rather than what they are exposed to.
Socioeconomic vulnerability indicators include poverty rate, percentage of population with limited English proficiency, percentage of population without health insurance, unemployment rate, and educational attainment. Five indicators capture the capacity of communities to respond to environmental stressors.
Health outcome indicators include asthma hospitalization rates, cardiovascular disease rates, low birth weight rates, and life expectancy. Four indicators capture the downstream health effects of environmental conditions.
Each indicator is normalized on a 0-to-100 scale and combined using weights derived from a community advisory process that included 12 public workshops and input from 340 residents.
What the Map Shows
The composite index reveals that Portland's environmental burdens concentrate in a geographic pattern that closely tracks historical redlining maps from the 1930s. The five highest-scoring census tracts, indicating the greatest environmental injustice, are all located in historically redlined neighborhoods in North and Northeast Portland and the Jade District in Southeast.
Communities where people of color constitute more than 50 percent of the population score an average of 68.4 on the composite index, compared to 25.2 for census tracts where people of color constitute less than 20 percent of the population. That 2.7-fold difference holds even after controlling for household income, suggesting that race is an independent predictor of environmental burden beyond its correlation with poverty.
Numbers do not lie, but they can be ignored. This index exists to make environmental injustice impossible to overlook and to give communities a tool for demanding accountability.
Specific Disparities
Several specific findings deserve attention. Residents in the top quintile of environmental burden are exposed to annual average PM2.5 concentrations of 9.8 micrograms per cubic meter, compared to 6.1 micrograms in the bottom quintile. While both figures fall below the EPA's recently tightened annual standard of 9.0 micrograms, the disparity itself is the issue.
Life expectancy varies by 11.3 years between the highest-burden and lowest-burden census tracts. Asthma hospitalization rates in the top quintile are 3.4 times higher than in the bottom quintile. These are not lifestyle differences. They are environmental differences with measurable health consequences.
Access to parks and green space shows an inverse pattern: the highest-burden communities have an average of 2.1 acres of park space per 1,000 residents, compared to 8.7 acres in the lowest-burden areas.
From Data to Action
TerraFuture is not releasing this data as an academic exercise. We are publishing the complete dataset, methodology, and interactive mapping tool on our open data portal and submitting the index to Portland's Bureau of Planning and Sustainability for integration into the city's comprehensive planning process.
We are also using the index to guide our own program investments, directing 65 percent of our 2024 program budget to census tracts scoring in the top two quintiles of environmental burden. Data without action is just documentation of harm. Our goal is to make this tool a catalyst for measurable change.
