Dr. David A. Padgett, Associate Professor of Geography, Tennessee State University

I currently serve as an Associate Professor of Geography at Tennessee State University (TSU), and have served as the Director of the Geographic Information Sciences (GISc) Laboratory at TSU since 2001. I have provided technical assistance to environmental justice and community-based organization (CBO) stakeholders in support community-based participatory research (CBPR) activities in mostly historically underserved communities, specifically:

• Developed applications for EJ SCREEN and ArcGIS Online in support of a CBO air quality monitoring project
• Conducted stakeholder training in geoscience and cartography in support of strategies to mitigate the negative impacts of landfills upon human health
• Led real estate data collection and analysis in support of CBO efforts to develop heritage tourism and preserve critical historical resources
• Led community-based participatory asset mapping and hydrological data analysis in support of community legal actions versus a proposed inland port facility that threatens the quality of life, and
• Developed GIS training in support of a community-based flood mitigation program in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward.

In 2022, I led the formation of the HBCU Environmental Justice Technical Team (HEJTT).  The HEJTT is a collaboration among geoscience, data science, and GIS experts affiliated with HBCUs.  We were first called into action in response to the Federal Justice 40 Initiative by Dr. Robert Bullard, Director and Founder of the Bullard Center for Climate and Environmental Justice at Texas Southern University.  Our initial task was to create a geospatially based alternative to the Climate and Economic Justice Screen Tool (CEJST).  Our new tool, built on a GIS platform, provides environmental justice stakeholders an effective means of visualizing and quantifying the extent of the environmental threats to their communities.  Using the CEJST alone will not support the development of competitive proposals in response to various Justice 40 and related RFPs.  We are in the process of leading training workshops for using our new tool and others including the Environmental Justice Screening Tool (EJ SCREEN).

Our next technical assistance task is to develop a user-friendly methodology to track Justice 40 spending from the Federal level through State and local levels.  In past and recent history, funding has been withheld from largely diverse urban areas by “red” state governments.  The most notable cases are associated with the Jackson, MS water crisis, and the post-Hurricane Harvey funding debacle in Houston, TX.  Our goal is to provide environmental justice communities with a clear vision of where and how Justice 40 benefits are meant to be directed.