FAQ
What is “Environmental Justice”?
Environmental Justice (EJ) was born as a slogan for the first time in the United States during the 1980s among Black and Latino communities. They mobilised against injustices perpetrated in their communities by polluting industries and waste disposal facilities. It later became an analytical frame, largely in relation to concerns about the unequal distribution of social and environmental costs between different human groups, classes, ethnicities but also in relation to gender and age. EJ draws attention to the link between pollution, race and poverty and tackles socio-spatial distribution of “bads” (emissions, toxins) and “goods” (like green spaces and better services).
It later expanded as a concept and theoretical framework, including multi-dimensional and interlinked aspects of justice related to three fundamental dimensions of EJ: distribution, recognition and participation, as explained above. It has also globalised, tackling issues such as trade agreements, the transfers of wastes, climate change and the Rights of Nature and has served to link up groups and networks within a common similar frame and understanding.
The global dimension is evident when it comes to trade and environmental degradation. A mine, a dam, a road in the forest are not isolated objects but connected sites along which value flows, accumulation occurs and costs are externalised.
Environmental Justice is both a social movement and an activist/mobilised science, and thus offers the potential to bring together citizens, researchers and scholars to create knowledge as part of a global and globalising environmental justice movement.
What is a socio-environmental conflict?
Socio-environmental conflicts generally describe a diverse range of contentious mobilizations related to environmental issues. In the EJAtlas, an environmental conflict case refers to the contentious mobilizations of civil society actors in which explicit social-environmental claims are made against a specific project or economic activity that is pursued by state, corporate, and, sometimes, also illicit actors (e.g., illegal loggers).
The EJAtlas documents socio-environmental conflicts related to claims against perceived negative social or environmental impacts with the following criteria:
Economic activity or legislation with actual or potential negative environmental and social outcomes;
Claim and mobilisation by environmental justice organisation (s) that such harm occurred or is likely to occur as a result of that activity
Reporting of that particular conflict in one or more published sources.
These conflicts usually arise from structural inequalities of income and power. Dimensions of environmental justice include distribution of the burdens of pollution and access to environmental resources, the right to participate in decision-making and the recognition of alternate world-views and understanding of development. The action repertoires may include formal claim-making, petitions, meetings, demonstrations, boycotts, strikes, legal actions, civil disobedience, collective violence, international campaigns and other action forms. In the act of claiming redistributions, these conflicts are often part of, or lead to larger gender, class, caste and ethnic struggles.
What type of information can you find in the EJAtlas?
The EJatlas maps conflicts across 10 main categories:
Nuclear
Mineral Ores and Building Extractions
Waste Management
Biomass and Land Conflicts
Fossil Fuels, Energy and Climate Justice
Water Management
Infrastructure and Built Environment
Tourism Recreation
Biodiversity Conservation Conflicts
Industrial and Utilities Conflicts
The database contains information on the investors, the drivers for these deals, and their impacts, basic data, source of conflict, project details, conflict and mobilisation, impacts, outcome, references to legislation, academic research, videos and pictures.
Featured maps have been designed for the second launch of the EJAtlas in collaboration with different organisations. Featured maps integrate geospatial indicators to better illustrate specific topics and contexts in which socio-environmental conflicts take place. This entails showing a number of socio-economic indicators in the form of intensity/choropleth maps (i.e. GDP, poverty or material extraction) or representing different types of land uses and biophysical parameters (i.e. pasture lands, forests, location of mines, protected areas or water scarce areas). The geodata used include vectors from national planning agencies (such as the case of Colombia´s SIGOT) or international agencies providing geodata such as UNEP, World Resource Institute, NASA´s SEDAC, as well as data generated by organisations working in one specific topic such as shale gas (www.unconventionalenergyresources.com) or land uses (www.globallandproject.org). Socio-economic data from SIPRI, materialflows.net, UN Comtrade and others has also been transformed into geographical layers specifically for the EJAtlas, through geo-referencing statistical data. Further featured maps will be developed in collaboration and coordination with ongoing campaigns or research projects.
How do we document the cases? A collaborative process
The EJAtlas is based on the work of hundreds of collaborators, from the academy, concerned citizens, informal committees, NGOs and other activist groups, who have been documenting environmental and social injustice and supporting communities on the ground for years.
All data is collected in an online database and moderated by the editorial team through double checking of information and to “homogenise” data in order to enable search/filter/browse functions. The cases are then approved and published on the map. Anyone can set up their account and contact the editorial team for contributing to the database or to flag up agitations happening around the world.
A commenting facility is available to the public at every conflict page, in order to promote discussion, debate and exchange on the matter with a wider public and EJAtlas users.
How can I use the EJAtlas?
The EJAtlas is a teaching, networking and advocacy resource. Strategists, activist organisers, scholars, and teachers will find many uses for the database, as well as citizens wanting to learn more about the often invisible conflicts taking place. The map is a valuable teaching resource for curricula about social and environmental issues. Researchers, journalists and bloggers can use it to find reference cases and to explore patterns and answers to research questions. Activists, organisers and campaigners can examine past cases to help strategise on the elements of winning campaigns. It is also a valuable networking tool so groups working on related issues or against the same corporate actors can connect with potential allies. You can find inspiration from other projects using our data here.
The Search & Filter functionality allows you to filter through any of the fields. The Featured maps combine new geospatial data layers on issues such as water scarcity, forest cover, mining and oil concessions, allowing for greater insight into the context and the underlying social and environmental drivers of the conflicts.
This data set is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported licence. You are free to use the work for noncommercial purposes only, with attribution given to the EJAtlas and a link to this page. Resulting work must be distributed under the same licence or one similar. If you wish to use the data for academic publications please cites this article explaining the methodology and aims of the atlas:
Leah Temper, Daniela del Bene and Joan Martinez-Alier. 2015. Mapping the frontiers and front lines of global environmental justice: the EJAtlas. Journal of Political Ecology 22: 255-278. http://jpe.library.arizona.edu/volume_22/Temper.pdf
How is the platform made?
The current EJAtlas platform was developed by Geomatico in 2023 based on an original design by Yakup Centinkaya. Yakup developed the original EJAtlas online platform in 2014 to specifically suit the research methodology developed by the EJAtlas team.
Every library in use is open source, like Leaflet, the map visualisation library. The base maps are loaded from OpenStreetMaps, ESRI, and free services as such. The code is scaffolded around the data structure designed by EJOLT to explicitly catalogue environmental conflicts. It is improved for the usability of the data for research purposes, like the filtering feature. Some constraints were set to control the data flow, such as the moderation layer for guaranteeing the reliability, and some integrations were implemented that enriched the data flow. The vector layers, like country borders, mining areas, biodiversity hotspots and the like, are uploaded over the web console in .kml or .shp format and processed to be shown on the web. The styles that are used for showing these areas are fully customisable via console too.
One limitation of this database lies in the variable quality of the information available. The priority was to generate a large variety of cases, for dissemination, comparison and to give an overview of the frequency of environmental conflicts. Thus, the information for individual cases is not exhaustive. The cases can act as references for researchers to further their own individual studies. Due to situations on the ground constantly changing and the majority of mapping work being based on time availability of contributors and volunteering work, some cases are not fully updated. The contextualisation of a case may also be controversial. One example is when conservation clashes with the right of communities to undertake livelihood activities. Our cases are based on the mobilisation of communities and our criteria for including cases is based on how they frame their claims and languages of valuation.
Global coverage is also uneven. The areas covered represent the vast activist knowledge base of the EJOLT partners and collaborators. Many of the cases are based on the databases of our partners including OCMAL database, the CDCA’s map of environmental conflicts, the FIOCRUZ map of Environmental Justice in Brazil, the work of ERA in Nigeria, WRM documenting tree plantation conflicts and Grain’s land grabbing research. We also count on a large extended network of researchers and activists expert in specific countries and thematic areas.
As the database expands, we expect more sources to come from people in other parts of the world. We specifically invite academic researchers and environmental justice organisations to get in touch with us to explore collaboration to increase the range of cases and analysis.
While we try to provide the most updated information about all conflicts, documenting the most recent events in each case can sometimes be a challenge. We urge users to check the “last update” information to see when a case was last updated and encourage activists and researchers with EJAtlas accounts to edit the cases sheets as soon as new important events occur. If you do not have an account, please feel free to email us with relevant updates.
How often are the cases updated?
We don't systematically update the cases in the EJAtlas. When there are relevant developments to a conflict, and a contributor is willing to update a case, we make every effort to do so. But otherwise, the EJAtlas is best considered as an archive of socioecological resistances.
Who fills the cases?
The EJAtlas is nourished by a very diverse network of contributors around the world. Some areas have higher coverage than others, some collaborators fill one case, some follow many conflicts in a given region and some cases are filled by remote researchers always being as faithful to the grievances of the affected communities as possible. We are incredibly thankful to everyone that contributes to the EJAtlas collective effort.
How do you moderate the cases and ensure data quality?
All data contained in the EJAtlas is based and derived from secondary sources. The process of moderation ensures that all significant claims and categories are properly referenced in secondary sources. We do not check the veracity of the reports in the secondary sources, but make all efforts to verify they are trusted publications.