This blog was co-written by Danielle Garcia, BCWK’s Education and Resource Hub Coordinator and Kourtney Revels, BCWK’s Water Justice Organizer.
This year, Bayou City Waterkeeper launches community engagement in Water Justice Zones (WJZ), focusing on water injustice in neighborhoods most impacted by systemic water injustices across the Lower Galveston Bay Watershed. Through WJZ, we aim to strengthen relationships, amplify community voices, support local campaigns and events, and collaboratively address long-standing water challenges in these areas.
In partnership with Rice University’s Spatial Studies Lab, we developed the Water Justice Zone Mapper—a tool that visualizes social vulnerability and water injustices within these zones. This resource is meant to assist in empowering communities and guiding meaningful actions to tackle systemic water issues across our region.
Why Water Justice Zones?
The Lower Galveston Bay Watershed is a large region, and the water-related injustices confronting its communities are both urgent and troubling. The Houston-Galveston Region, deeply rooted in the ecological and cultural significance of its waterways, navigates a complex relationship with its natural resources. This challenge is heightened by the increasing scarcity of clean water and the growing risks of industrial pollution, unsafe conditions, and flooding.
This situation has been worsened by historic disinvestment and disengagement from the communities most affected by these water issues of water quality, flood and stormwater management, access to clean water, disinvestment in water infrastructure, and environmental and climate justice. These realities highlight the critical need for equitable access and sustainable management, ensuring that every resident can fully benefit from our water resources and be protected by water infrastructure.
Naming these areas within our watershed as Water Justice Zones empowers us to focus and streamline our organizing efforts, allowing us to prioritize areas where legacy environmental disparities are most present. These zones highlight communities dealing with systemic challenges related to water access, flood risk, pollution, and undermaintained infrastructure, ensuring our interventions are targeted and impactful for these communities.
We have identified four priority zones including Northeast Houston, Houston Port Communities, Southeast Houston, and Brazoria. Exploratory Water Justice Zones, or zones where we are beginning to build connections, include Fort Bend/Southwest Houston and Galveston.
By naming and mapping these zones, we create clear, actionable entry points for our work in areas where we are already mobilizing our community-centered strategy. The Water Justice Zones serve as the backbone of our engagement, fostering deeper connections and sustained efforts across the Lower Galveston Bay Watershed.
Our Path Here
The needs of our communities have always driven our water justice work. Over the years, we’ve responded to countless calls for support—whether helping residents facing urgent legal challenges or investigating environmental hazards like sanitary sewer overflows (SSOs). Each of these interventions was critical in addressing immediate issues, but they often existed as isolated responses to systemic problems.
Through this work, a clear pattern emerged — the communities most impacted by these water injustices were often the same, facing compounding vulnerabilities. Recognizing this, we knew we needed a more coordinated approach—one that would allow us to address root causes rather than isolated symptoms. This realization led directly to the creation of the Water Justice Zones strategy, which enables us to focus our community resources, build stronger relationships, and develop long-term solutions in the areas most in need of our assistance in our watershed.
In order to activate a more intersectional environmental justice-based organizing strategy within our Water Justice Zone framework, we will be initial in centering community voices, prioritizing equitable solutions, and foster collaborations that address the interconnected issues of water access, pollution, and climate resilience. This approach aligns with our ongoing commitment to growing our advocacy, as outlined in our blog post, Growing our Advocacy: Launching Community Organizing that Centers Cultural Strategy & Justice.
Water Justice Zones Mapper
To support this work, we have developed the Water Justice Zone Mapper, a tool that offers accessible, data-driven insights into the specific challenges faced by these neighborhoods around water and environmental justice. Created in partnership with Rice University’s Spatial Studies Lab, the mapper visualizes critical data on social vulnerability and environmental risk, providing an interactive platform for residents, organizers, and advocates. By identifying where water injustices are most severe, the WJZ Mapper enables communities to strategize more effectively and advocate for equitable solutions.
To define the boundaries of each Water Justice Zone, we relied on a combination of on-site information, major highways, and the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI). We focused on areas where SVI scores were 0.75 or higher, ensuring we captured neighborhoods facing the greatest environmental and social challenges, such as high concentrations of Sanitary Sewer overflows (within the City of Houston), open drain lines, 100-year FEMA floodplain, and other indicators such as proximity to industrial facilities. After refining these boundaries and eliminating gaps, we finalized the zone layers to reflect the regions most in need of focused resources and sustained advocacy.
These zones guide our work, concentrating our resources and partnerships where they are needed most. However, they do not limit us—we remain open to working outside these zones as community needs evolve.
How the WJZ Mapper Empowers Communities
The Water Justice Zone (WJZ) Mapper is a tool designed to help communities in Greater Houston organize for environmental justice and climate resilience. By visualizing local and public data on social vulnerability and environmental risks — such as flooding, sewer overflows, and drainage infrastructure — the mapper allows us to visualize compounding risks related to water in areas like Northeast Houston and the Port Communities. It also raises community awareness by making these issues around water visibly tangible and easily understood.
The Mapper is publicly accessible and will allow residents to use this tool in workshops or advocacy meetings to layer information and further their advocacy, demanding equitable policy changes backed by data. Key features include searching for your address, taking quick screenshots or images, and using drawing tools to mark areas, drop pins, or highlight specific locations. Users can also add more information—such as .kml files or other public datasets—to create visuals tailored to their community. Additionally, this map can be used for asset mapping and mapping key resources to the community to tie localized data to advocacy efforts and strengthen community-led solutions.
By empowering communities with critical information, the WJZ Mapper serves as a catalyst for transformative change, helping neighborhoods most impacted by water injustice to advocate for the protections they need and deserve.
Looking Ahead
Our Water Justice Zones organizing strategy marks a new phase in our fight for water justice. By naming, mapping, and organizing within these zones, we ensure that our efforts are more focused, impactful, and community-driven than ever before. The tools and resources we’ve developed—including the WJZ Mapper—will be continuously shaped by feedback from BCWK’s Community Research and Action Network (CRANe), ensuring they truly reflect the needs and priorities of the communities we are accountable to.
Stay tuned as we kick off community engagement and mobilize action within the Water Justice Zones in 2025! In the meantime, explore our progress and reflections in our blog, Achievements in Our First Year of Organizing for Water Justice, highlighting key milestones and valuable lessons from our journey in implementing and advocating for water justice.