Combined Air Emissions Reporting Project
What is the Combined Air Emissions Reporting (CAER) Project?
Air emissions reporting can be streamlined, making the overall process significantly less burdensome and time consuming for industry, federal, state, local, and tribal (SLT) air quality authorities. Currently, air emissions information is collected by the EPA and state, local or tribal air agencies through numerous separate regulations, in a variety of formats, according to different reporting schedules, and using multiple routes of data transfer. In the proposed future state, the CAER project is expected to reduce the cost to industry and government for providing and managing important environmental data and to improve decision-making capacity through more timely availability of data.
The goals of this project are:
- Reduce industry burden for point source reporting;
- Improve timeliness and transparency of data;
- Create consistent information across air emissions programs;
- Improve data quality;
- Improve accessibility and usability of data; and
- Support more timely decision-making.
The CAER project started in 2016 after a LEAN event that brought stakeholders to the table to discuss current air emissions reporting practices and how to improve these. After this event the CAER Product Design Team (PDT) was formed and work started on Short Term Win projects and after that, longer term requirements gathering projects to build a new reporting system to share data amongst federal and state air emissions programs.
CAER Product Design Team (PDT)
CAER Outreach from Previous Years
What is the Combined Air Emissions Reporting System (CAERS)?
After several years of working with our Product Design Team (PDT) we have created the Combined Air Emissions Reporting System (CAERS) that allows industry and states to enter and send their annual emissions reports for the National Emissions Inventory (NEI) and share data with the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI).
Thanks to the hard work of our pilot state of Georgia, through their staff at the Georgia Department of Natural Resources (GADNR), our CAER system is now able to assist industry in reporting criteria and toxics air emissions data. It is currently being used by several SLT partners including: Arizona and Pima County Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Maine, Rhode Island, and Washington, D.C. with more states projected to onboard in the next few years. Developed with the Agile paradigm, our newest onboarded SLTs continue to contribute feedback to help improve our system as does our Product Design Team.
The ultimate goal is for CAERS to share data with other federal and SLT programs where applicable. In future we will be obtaining source test data from the Compliance and Emissions Data Reporting Interface (CEDRI) and greenhouse gas pollutant emissions data from Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP).