Working Together for Environmental Results

As this report shows, the United States has made great strides in meeting environmental challenges over the past three decades. Our air is cleaner, our drinking water safer, our waste management practices more sound. The health of the American people is generally improving. Yet environmental and health challenges remain and there is much we don’t know about the condition of the environment and human health. To better understand the status of and trends in the environment, and to better manage environmental protection programs, we need better indicators of environmental and human health.

Using an integrated system of local, regional, and national indicators and monitoring would strengthen our approach to protecting the environment. With such a system in place, we could confidently:

• Assess and document the current state of the environment at the national level and measure our progress toward reaching our environmental goals.
  
  
• Understand the relationships between stressors on the environment and their ultimate effects on ecological condition and human health.
  
  
• Focus our environmental protection resources on areas of greatest concern.
  
  
• Communicate with the American people about what is happening, why, and how best to safeguard human health and the environment.

With this picture in mind, this final chapter explores the key challenges in developing better indicators, and the next steps that EPA proposes to take with its partners to address these challenges.

Developing a useful set of environmental indicators is a daunting task. Below, EPA has identified some of the major issues that require careful consideration as a system of indicators is developed and implemented.

Addressing Data Needs to Support Better Indicators. Be-cause of a lack of national indicators, we cannot provide complete answers to many of the questions posed in this report. (Similarly, 44 percent of the indicators in the Heinz Center’s The State of the Nation’s Ecosystems could not be reported nationally.1) In addition, many “national” data sets do not cover the entire country, but only a subset, such as the coastal U.S. major watersheds or the Pacific Northwest. Further, for many indicators, data are not available for more than one time period, limiting our ability to discern a trend in environmental condition or human health. This draft report begins to identify where additional data are needed to support national indicators, but a thorough review is needed to identify data needs and to set priorities.

Improving Data Collection and Analysis. Improving how we collect and analyze data remains a significant challenge. Many government agencies and other groups gather similar environmental data to satisfy various program objectives and goals. Yet, differences—and, in some cases, inadequacies—in approaches to data collection and analysis often limit the broader use of these data. For example, states gather comprehensive data on water quality, but differences in monitoring approaches limit our ability to provide a picture of the water quality at the national level. Developing and applying standard data collection and analysis approaches are critical to ensuring comparability of data, and to enabling greater use of the extensive environmental and health data already being collected.

Reaching Agreement on an Integrated Set of Indicators. National indicators provide a picture of the overall condition of our nation’s environment and health, and inform national environmental policy. But regional and local indicators are also needed to guide regional and local policy while answering the questions Americans have about the conditions in their backyard that affect them most: Is my drinking water safe? Does the air in my community meet health standards? National, regional, and local indicators all serve important roles in informing the public and assisting governments and others in protecting our environment and human health. A major challenge before us is reaching agreement on an integrated core set of national, regional, and local indicators and putting them into practice.

Making Indicators More Understandable and Usable. Indicators can be powerful tools, but only if they clearly communicate environmental conditions to decision-makers and the public. For example, many Americans are familiar with the color-coded alerts associated with the Air Quality Index and adjust their activity accordingly when “code red” days occur. Because of their technical nature, however, indicators often can be difficult to understand. An important challenge, therefore, is developing more indices that clearly communicate environmental conditions and trends. Further, for an indicator or index to be useful for decision-makers, thresholds or criteria distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable conditions are needed. Such thresholds or criteria currently do not exist for many indicators, and need to be identified.

Understanding Cause and Effect. Effective public policies and programs to protect the health and environment require knowing the causes of the problems they seek to correct. In some cases, current science supports causal linkages between a specific exposure and known effects on human health or ecological condition—for example, the link between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and an increased risk of developing lung cancer. But the link between specific environmental pollutants and the effect on human health and ecological condition is complex and often difficult to describe. Understanding and quantifying causality—that is, sorting out the role of the environment and the role of other factors and their interactions—remains a significant scientific challenge.

Addressing the challenges described above is a task far greater than EPA can undertake alone. Success requires a sustained and coordinated commitment from many partners: other federal agencies; state, tribal, and local governments; the research community; nongovernmental organizations; and industry. It will also require collaborative analysis and replication of many of the indicator projects under way nationwide, and around regional resources of great environmental importance. (For more information about such projects, see http://www.epa.gov/indicators.)

Such cooperative efforts are already in progress. As mentioned, many of the indicators included in this draft report were developed by other federal, state, regional, local, and tribal governments and the nonprofit sector. Additionally, in December 2002, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) launched a new effort to enhance coordination among federal agencies and to develop policy guidance on the future development of environmental and sustainable development indicators. The CEQ working group will:

• Develop agreement around a set of national-level environmental indicators that can be linked to regional and local conditions.
  
  
• Explore opportunities for collaboration among and between federal agencies, state, regional, and local agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and private-sector groups to improve the validity, reliability, consistency, and coverage of the data used for indicators.
  
  
• Consider how statistical reporting and data collection should be organized within the federal government, recognizing the data needs of agencies’ programs and statutory authorities.

The goal of this effort is to have interlocking sets of environmental and human health indicators that can inform decisions at the local, state, regional, and national levels.

EPA is committed to being an active partner in this national effort. Within EPA, the next step is to develop—in concert with the CEQ indicators working group—a long-term strategy for environmental indicators that builds on this draft report. Key components of that strategy will be based on ideas generated by discussions with EPA’s partners and the general public. Through such discussions, we intend to collaborate with other government agencies to reach agreement on an integrated set of national, regional, and local indicators and how best to put them into practice in planning and managing programs and in communicating environmental and health outcomes to the nation.

Your participation and feedback, therefore, is a vital component of the success of the Environmental Indicators Initiative. Please visit our web site at http://www.epa.gov/indicators to learn more about the Environmental Indicators Initiative activities and to provide your input. Together, we are working toward a results-based management system that will ensure cleaner air, purer water, and better protected land for generations of Americans to come.

Endnotes

1 The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment. The State of the Nation’s Ecosystems: Measuring Lands, Waters, and Living Resources of the United States, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, September, 2002.