Background

This repository hosts the analysis, datasets, and supporting materials for the inaugural data story by the Public Environmental Data Partners (PEDP), part of the special series Made Possible. The series spotlights the public servants, academics, and community advocates who rely on federal environmental justice tools and datasets to serve their communities.

In this first feature, we analyzed 2,212 studies that used disappearing federal climate and environmental justice tools—including EJScreen, CEJST, EJI, and FEMA’s Climate Risk Viewer—to understand how researchers, students, and community advocates rely on them to advance science, policy, and equity.

The story also documents the urgent volunteer-led effort across PEDP’s coalition to preserve and restore public access to these tools after their removal by the current administration in early 2025.

📖 Read the full story: 2,212 studies used disappearing federal climate justice tools. We analyzed them all.

Repository Structure

climate-ej-tools-publications/
│
├── 01_raw_data/           # Original datasets downloaded from external sources — never modified
├── 02_processed_data/     # Cleaned and manually coded datasets — finalized versions ready for analysis
├── 03_codebooks/          # Documentation defining coding categories (for studies, publishers, etc.)
├── 04_metrics_data/       # Google Scholar or bibliometric metrics collected at data extraction time
├── 05_cleaned_datasets/   # RDS files with cleaned, merged, and stratified samples ready for visualization or modeling
├── 06_viz_ready/          # Data prepared specifically for visualization dashboards, plots, or reports
│
└── README.md

Final Deliverables

The following files represent the final outputs used for visualization, analysis, and reporting:

Deliverable	Description	File Path
All studies (categorized)	Merged dataset of all analyzed studies, ready for visualization.	06_viz_ready/all_studies_merged.csv
All publishers (categorized)	Merged dataset of all publishers, categorized by type and relevance.	06_viz_ready/all_publishers.csv
Codebooks	Documentation of coding definitions and category descriptions.	03_codebooks/
Analysis script	Main Quarto document that reproduces all figures, tables, and metrics.	analysis.qmd

Getting Started

1️⃣ Clone this repository

git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/climate-ej-tools-publications.git
cd climate-ej-tools-publications

2️⃣ Install required R libraries

Before running the analysis, install and load the following R libraries:

# Folder structure helpers
library(here)
library(readr)
library(ezknitr)

# Data cleaning & analysis
library(tidyverse)
library(janitor)
library(lubridate)
library(stringr)
library(forcats)
library(vcd)

# Visualization
library(highcharter)
library(igraph)
library(RColorBrewer)
library(htmlwidgets)
library(gt)

To install them all at once:

install.packages(c(
  "here", "readr", "ezknitr",
  "tidyverse", "janitor", "lubridate", "stringr", "forcats", "vcd",
  "highcharter", "igraph", "RColorBrewer", "htmlwidgets", "gt"
))

3️⃣ Reproduce or Extend the Analysis

To reproduce or extend the analysis, see the main Quarto script:

analysis.qmd

Render the main report using Quarto:

quarto render analysis.qmd

This will generate all tables, charts, and relevant output.

References and Licensing

• references.bib — Bibliography file

• LICENSE — License for repository use