Consideration of Environmental Justice in EPA’s Regulatory Analyses: A Review and Assessment

Increasingly, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conducts environmental justice (EJ) assessments as part of its regulatory analyses for new rules. We inventory and evaluate the available EJ analyses for the EPA’s 68 economically significant final rules issued between 2012 and 2024. We find that three-quarters (53) of these rules include an EJ analysis, and 45 of these analyses are at least partially quantitative. The proportion of rules that include an EJ analysis increased from about 60 percent in 2012 to more than 90 percent within the past three years. While many of the quantitative EJ analyses examined only baseline issues, some of the more recent assessments have used more nuanced methods to assess differences in vulnerability, cumulative impacts, and climate risk. Three EJ analyses consider the incidence of costs across population groups. While recognizing the different budget, data, and modeling constraints across EPA program offices, we emphasize the need to consider EJ at the early stages of the analytical process. We also discuss important gaps in data and methods that are key to examining the underlying heterogeneity in concentrations and health risks, EJ impacts of regulatory options, regulatory costs, and net benefits across demographic groups.