DEQ North Carolina Community Mapping System
Description
The DEQ North Carolina Community Mapping System is an online, interactive mapping platform that brings together environmental, health, demographic, and infrastructure data to help communities understand local conditions and support environmental justice and planning efforts. Through a web map interface, users can explore layers related to air and water quality, regulated facilities, climate and flooding risks, sensitive receptors (like schools), and community characteristics, allowing residents, advocates, and decision?makers to identify overburdened areas, visualize cumulative impacts, and inform permitting, enforcement, and investment decisions.
Questions this resource can help answer
Are there clusters of regulated or industrial facilities near my neighborhood, school, or drinking water source?
Which communities in my county show both high environmental burdens and high social vulnerability or EJ indicators?
How do air, water, or flood?risk layers align with where people live, work, and go to school?
Are certain communities more likely to face multiple overlapping risks (e.g., facilities, flood risk, and sensitive populations)?
Where might DEQ and local governments prioritize permitting scrutiny, enforcement, monitoring, or investment?
How do I use this resource?
To use the DEQ North Carolina Community Mapping System, open the web map, use the search bar to enter an address, city, or county, then zoom to your area of interest. Turn map layers on and off (e.g., permitted facilities, air and water data, flood or climate risk, schools, demographic or EJ indicators) using the layer panel, and adjust transparency to see how they overlap. Click on a facility, census tract, or other feature to open a pop?up with details (e.g., permit info, monitoring data, vulnerability metrics). Use the legend and basemap options to interpret what you see, and where available, use print/export tools or screenshots to save maps for meetings, comments, or reports.
Pro tips
Start with one or two layers (e.g., facilities + demographics) to avoid clutter, then add more as needed.
Always read pop?up details and layer descriptions—they explain what each dataset means and its time frame.
Look for overlaps (e.g., many facilities + high social vulnerability) to identify potential priority areas.
Pair the map with local knowledge (community meetings, site visits) before drawing strong conclusions.
Note the date and layers used whenever you screenshot or print, for documentation and future updates.
Resource information
Technical specifications
The DEQ North Carolina Community Mapping System is a GIS-based tool built by compiling and harmonizing many existing datasets into a single web map. DEQ aggregates spatial data on regulated facilities, permits, monitoring sites, and environmental conditions (air, water, waste, climate/flood risk) from its own regulatory and monitoring databases, then joins these with demographic and vulnerability indicators (e.g., Census/ACS-based measures and federal/state EJ indices) at geographies such as census block groups or tracts. Each dataset is cleaned, standardized (e.g., common coordinate system, consistent geographic units), and documented in layer metadata, then published as map services and combined in an online viewer with configurable symbology, pop?ups, and search tools. The result is a layered, interactive map that allows users to visualize and overlay multiple environmental and community indicators, but it does not create new statistics—rather, it organizes and displays existing, authoritative data in an accessible format.
