The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Engineering Issue papers are a series of documents that summarize the available information on specific contaminants, selected treatment and site remediation technologies, and related issues. This Engineering Issue paper is intended to provide remedial project managers (RPMs), on-scene coordinators (OSCs), contractors, and other state or private re...

Environmental policy makers are embracing consensus-based approaches to environmental decision making in an attempt to enhance public participation in conservation and facilitate the potentially incompatible goals of environmental protection and economic growth. Although such approaches may produce positive results in immediate spatial and temporal contexts and under some forms of governance, t...

The significance of the environment for health is increasingly being recognized. There is a need for systematic approaches to assessment of environmental factors most relevant to health, health outcomes most influenced by the environment, and the relationships between them, as well as for approaches to representing the results of such assessments in policy deliberations. As a step in the develo...

Background Appalachia is a region of the United States that faces significant environmental and health disparities. Understanding these disparities and the social determinants that contribute to them are critical to reducing health inequities. The purpose of this research is two-fold. First, through secondary data analysis, we document environmental and health disparities as well as demographic...

Eighteen years ago President William Clinton issued Executive Order 13045 calling for each federal agency to “ensure that its policies, programs, activities, and standards address disproportionate risks to children that result from environmental health risks or safety risks” (Clinton and Gore 1997). As part of this Executive Order, Clinton established the President’s Task Force on Environmental...

Governmental environmental protection is often implemented by specifying a standard value of pollution, measured or actual, not to be exceeded. We consider the standard for ozone in the United States, interpreting it using a hypothesis testing framework, and show (in a simplified setting) how a statistician could implement this standard. This implementation is contrasted to the implementation b...

A cornerstone of environmental policy is the debate over protecting nature for humans’ sake (instrumental values) or for nature’s (intrinsic values) (1). We propose that focusing only on instrumental or intrinsic values may fail to resonate with views on personal and collective well-being, or “what is right,” with regard to nature and the environment. Without complementary attention to other wa...

This paper investigates the effect of domestic politics on international environmental policy by incorporating into a classic model of coalition formation the phenomenon of lobbying by national special-interest groups. In doing so, it contributes to the theory of international environmental agreements, which has overwhelmingly assumed that governments make choices based on benefits and costs th...