Government officials and advocates used them to help communities disproportionately affected by climate change and pollution.
The White House effort to scrub government websites of environmental data has researchers and activists trying to recreate several lost mapping tools to protect communities vulnerable to pollution and climate change.
One of them pinpointed existing air and water pollutant risks nationwide, for example. Another mapped low-income areas facing high energy costs, while a third showed the location and costs of future climate threats. Government officials, academics and activists used that data for everything from studying environmental harms at the local level to funneling money to help those communities protect themselves against those threats.
Without them, users say it’s harder and more time-consuming to do community organizing, grant writing and other work. Removing these public mapping tools “is actually dumbing down the way the government works,” says Robert Verchick, a climate legal expert at Loyola University.
Bloomberg Green
By Zahra Hirji
May 7, 2025