City of Dallas – Nanditha Ram Satagopan – 2023

Goals

The City of Dallas’ Comprehensive Environmental & Climate Action Plan (CECAP) and the Racial Equity Plan (REP) have common goals of implementing programs and initiatives through evaluation from an environmental justice lens. Nanditha was enlisted as a Climate Corps fellow to research best EJ practices implemented by governments, provide recommendations to improve the Dallas EJ Screening Tool, and develop a framework to perform site prioritization for air quality sensors.

Solutions

In collaboration with OEQS at the City of Dallas, Nanditha delivered the following:

1. Conducted preliminary research on environmental justice work by various City departments. Information on geospatial tools, community engagement strategies and challenges/solutions from both the research and interviews were compiled into a baseline living document.
2. Proposed comprehensive recommendations to the Dallas EJ Screening Tool currently under development for the addition of relevant data layers, interface modifications, and beyond.
3. Researched and compiled supplementary tools that can be used along with the Dallas EJ Screening Tool to provide a multidisciplinary outlook to programs.
4. Assessed and extracted data from the EPA EJScreen to calculate an EJ Score for each proposed air quality sensor installation. The locations were plotted on a map using ArcGIS Pro to observe site distribution across the city. 

Potential Impact

The in-depth research on environmental justice initiatives and tools done by Nanditha will provide as a strong resource and baseline for the equitable deployment of future programs by the City of Dallas and OEQS. The site prioritization assessment for the installation of air quality sensors across the city will be vital in identifying crucial and vulnerable neighborhoods that are most impacted by pollution. Since the rubric used is reproducible and standardized, it can be used for different datasets identifying future proposed sites.

The mapping of all proposed and operational sites done by Nanditha will further help in understanding which Dallas communities have an excess or dearth of air quality sensors for proper distribution within equity priority areas.