Maryland Gov. Wes Moore last week directed several state agencies — including the health, transportation and housing departments — to coordinate a more unified approach to environmental justice.
Aiming to fill gaps left by the Trump administration scrubbing climate and cumulative impact data from federal websites, Moore signed an executive order Thursday that would create a new framework for state agencies to help communities that have been overburdened with pollution, health problems and climate vulnerabilities.
A key item in his order directs Maryland agencies to use the state’s environmental justice mapping tool, also known as MDEnviroScreen, to track disparities for environmental hazards, health risks and more.
Since 2022, Maryland has required certain environmental permit applicants to use the state’s environmental justice screening tool to analyze the preexisting burdens around proposed projects. But the map was knocked offline earlier this year, according to Maryland Matters, after the Trump administration in February took down EPA’s public environmental justice mapping tool, which fed data into Maryland’s state-level tool.
