Panel speakers at EEW’s public event “Democratizing Environmental Data” in October 2020
The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) is excited to announce receipt of a $20,000 grant from Code for Science & Society’s new Virtual Events Fund, made possible by a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. This grant will enable EDGI’s Environmental Enforcement Watch (EEW) work to continue working with community groups to analyze the US Environmental Protection Agency’s publicly available environmental enforcement data and hold the Biden administration accountable to its commitments to environmental justice.
EEW is a collaborative project across EDGI’s working groups seeking to bring people together from different backgrounds to engage with data from the EPA’s Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) database. So far, EEW has conducted novel research into the impact of COVID on environmental reporting and released report cards on industry compliance with and EPA enforcement of environmental laws in the home regions of key senators and representatives.
EDGI’s EEW events engage the public in report-making, from delving into EPA data and running Jupyter Notebooks, to sharing stories about the places they care about. Over the summer, EEW co-hosted workshops with the Sunrise Movement Boston Hub, as well as a four-part public workshop series dedicated to developing congressional report cards. In commitment to the principles of environmental data justice, all of EEW’s code and data are available on EDGI’s GitHub, an open-source coding platform.
With this grant, EEW will be able to work even more closely with community groups. Over four months, EEW will hold collaborative events with groups to learn from their on-the-ground strategies and experiences and identify needs to design open source data science tools that empower their existing work.
At this time, EEW is building partnerships with community organizations engaged in environmental justice work, for this grant and future opportunities with EEW. Organizations seeking support analyzing and interpreting the EPA’s enforcement data are encouraged to contact EEW: environmentalenforcementwatch@gmail.com.