The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) is an action-oriented research collaborative and network dedicated to advancing the Environmental Right-to-Know (ERTK). To us ERTK means:
- People should be able to know and make decisions about environmental concerns and maintain rights of consent, refusal, and self-determination in environmental decision-making.
- The collection and stewardship of environmental information should equip people, communities, and workers to protect their health and support the flourishing of surrounding ecosystems.
- All people, especially minoritized communities who experience disproportionate harms, should have equitable access to comprehensive and legible environmental information in order to seek redress for harms and build relations of responsibility and accountability.
To do advance the ERTK, we:
- Document, contextualize, and analyze current changes to environmental data and governance through transdisciplinary and collaborative work;
- Foster the stewardship and expansion of public knowledge through participatory civic technologies and infrastructures;
- Create new communities of practice to enable government and industry accountability; and
- Promote models and tools that emphasize community participation at all scales.
History and Impact
Forming in November 2016 to document and analyze changes to vulnerable federal environmental data and governance practices under the Trump administration, EDGI has grown into the preeminent watchdog tracking and assessing modifications to federal environmental information resources and their accessibility; a national leader in highlighting Trump’s impacts on environmental, data, and information policies and practices; and the forerunner in developing a new field of inquiry and critique: environmental data justice.
Our work has garnered national and international media coverage, appearing in major outlets like The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Time, and CNN. Among our notable successes, we:
- Launched the Public Environmental Data Partners, a data preservation coalition dedicated to making publicly accessible archives of federal environmental and climate data.
- Documented and sounded the alarm when the first and second Trump administrations purged climate and other environmental information from federal websites.
- Documented the reduction in the term “climate change” across federal websites under the first Trump administration, finding an almost 40% decrease between 2016 and 2020.
- Documented the significant declines in the EPA’s enforcement of the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and other federal environmental laws under the first Trump administration.
- Built open-source comparison software that was integrated into the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine as the “changes” feature, allowing the public to see the differences between any two versions of a webpage.
- Co-created a searchable public repository of EPA disclosures obtained through the Freedom of Information Act — a collaboration with the Sierra Club, Toxic Docs, and other environmental groups.
- Provided recommendations on the EPA’s ECHO database that initiated the creation of a new system enabling the public to subscribe to permit violation notifications for areas of concern.
- Created open-source notebooks that help communities and journalists write more informed public comments and articles.
- Wrote an open letter to the EPA imploring the agency not to sunset a public web archive with hundreds of thousands of environmental documents, which resulted in the EPA announcing a year long extension.
Read more about our work in our 2024 Annual Report or on our Working Groups' pages.