In February 2025, the Trump administration's EPA quietly deleted EJScreen — the only federal tool that told communities how much pollution they were exposed to. A federal judge dismissed the challenge to restore it in March 2026. AIEcoSense was built within weeks to fill that gap, permanently.
EJScreen was the EPA's primary environmental justice screening tool. It told communities: how much PM2.5 are you breathing? How close are you to a Superfund site? Is your neighborhood disproportionately burdened by industrial pollution? For low-income families, public defenders, environmental lawyers, journalists, and community organizers, it was indispensable.
When it disappeared, those communities lost their voice in regulatory proceedings, their evidence in legal cases, and their ability to advocate for themselves. AIEcoSense gives that voice back.
"Every family — regardless of income, education, or political power — deserves to know what they're breathing, what's in their water, and what industrial operations are near their home." — VPDLNY
AIEcoSense pulls from four authoritative open-data sources — Open-Meteo (air quality + weather), NOAA (weather alerts), OpenAQ (monitoring stations), and Zippopotam (geocoding). All data is aggregated in real-time on Cloudflare Edge infrastructure, then synthesized into plain-English health assessments by Anthropic's Claude AI.
The platform also exposes a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server — letting Claude agents and Claude Code access real-time environmental data for any US ZIP code. This means any developer or researcher using Claude can build environmental intelligence directly into their tools.
AIEcoSense is a project of VPDLNY — the Vulnerable Persons Defense League of New York. We are a collective of technologists, artists, journalists, and community organizers based in Staten Island, NYC. Our mission is to use knowledge and information — never violence — to defend vulnerable and marginalized people against powerful institutions.
We've been building public-interest technology tools since the early Bitcoin days. We build in public. We don't take VC money. We don't sell data. We just build things that need to exist.
We welcome media coverage, academic research partnerships, and collaboration with environmental justice organizations. All data is freely available and citable.
Check your neighborhood's air quality right now. Or build environmental intelligence into your Claude agent in under 2 minutes.