EMI

Terms of Use and Disclaimer

1. What this service is

EMI is a free environmental screening tool. For any point on the world map it combines long-run environmental measurements into one Environmental Screening Score from 0 to 100 — higher means a lower measured environmental burden — across six pillars: air quality, thermal stress, river flood, water, fire and green space. It is provided for informational and educational use, at no charge, with no account required. In this document, "the operator" means whoever operates this site.

It is a screening signal: it tells you where to look harder, not what to conclude.

2. Not professional advice

Nothing on this site is engineering, environmental, legal, financial, health or property advice. The score is not a survey, an inspection or an assessment of any specific site, and it must not be relied on as due diligence. Before any decision that depends on environmental conditions — buying, building, insuring, investing, relocating — verify the facts independently, with qualified professionals and primary data. A low score is a reason to investigate; a high score is not a verdict that a place is safe.

3. Hazards and coverage limits

  • Not included in this score: earthquake, coastal/storm-surge flooding, wind, landslide. None of these is measured anywhere in this product. Their absence from the score does not mean they were assessed and found absent.
  • The flood pillar covers river flooding only. Coastal flooding, storm surge and rainfall that never reaches a river are outside it, and the model behind it counts no flood defences. Where the river-flood model has no data, that is not the same as low risk.
  • A missing value reads "not measured", never zero. Absence of data is never a claim of safety, anywhere in this product.
  • Nothing here is real-time. The inputs are fixed historical datasets — for example 1991-2020 climate normals, a multi-year satellite PM2.5 average, a 2021 land-cover snapshot. The score describes long-run conditions, not today's, and it does not monitor, forecast or warn of current or imminent events.
  • Accuracy and coverage vary by region. How each pillar is computed, the data windows behind it and its known limitations are documented on the methodology page; read it before relying on any number.

4. Data sources and licences

The scores are derived works: the operator computes them from the third-party datasets named below, used under their respective licences. Those licences require the following notices, reproduced in their required wording:

  • Atmospheric Composition Analysis Group, Washington University in St. Louis — SatPM2.5 V6.GL.03 — CC BY 4.0.
  • Climate TRACE emissions data — CC BY 4.0 with named exceptions; transformed by EMI into a distance-weighted CO₂e proximity burden.
  • Generated using European Union’s Copernicus Land Monitoring Service information; the monthly burnt-area fractions are modified by EMI into a per-cell annual maximum. Neither the European Commission nor the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service endorses EMI or is responsible for any use of this information.
  • © ESA WorldCover project 2021 / Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021) processed by ESA WorldCover consortium — CC BY 4.0.
  • © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL.
  • Basemap: © OpenStreetMap contributors · Natural Earth.

The complete list of sources — including Copernicus ERA5-Land and CEMS fire-weather data, NASA MODIS, and the WRI Aqueduct river-flood hazard maps — with what each is used for, is shown in the product's "Data sources" panel. No data provider endorses this product, and none is responsible for what this product publishes.

5. No warranty and limitation of liability

The service and its scores are provided as is and as available, with no warranty of any kind — no promise of accuracy, completeness, availability, or fitness for any particular purpose. Data errors, gaps and model limitations exist; the known ones are documented on the methodology page.

You use the service at your own risk. To the fullest extent the law that applies to you allows, the operator is not liable for any loss or damage arising from use of, or reliance on, the service or its scores — including decisions taken, or not taken, because of a score. If you need a dependable assessment of a specific site, commission one from qualified professionals; pointing you toward that step is exactly what this tool is for.

6. Privacy

There are no accounts and none is required. The service sets no tracking cookies, builds no user profiles and keeps no database of visitors — it is stateless by design. What it does process: the coordinates you click or search are processed on our own servers, against our own data, to compute the answer, and are sent to no third party. Your IP address is used transiently, in memory, for rate limiting. On your first visit, the approximate (city-level) location of your IP address, as provided by the hosting network, is used only to centre the map; it is not stored or shared. Responses may be cached — in memory and on the hosting network — so repeated requests for the same place answer faster.

7. Changes and contact

These terms may change as the product changes. The version published on this site is the current one. Questions, corrections and reports of errors are welcome through the contact channels published on the site.