environmental research plan

Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

Understanding ecosystems for a sustainable future, search form.

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What is SERC?

The Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) provides science-based knowledge to meet critical environmental challenges.  SERC leads objective research on coastal ecosystems—where land meets the sea—to inform real-world decisions for wise policies, best business practices, and a sustainable planet. 

As the leading environmental research institute of the world’s largest museum complex, SERC’s headquarters comprise 2,650 acres of diverse landscape and 15 miles of protected shoreline on the nation’s largest estuary - Chesapeake Bay – just 25 miles from the nation’s capital.  The site serves as a natural laboratory for long-term and cutting edge ecological research.  Here we are exploring the most pressing issues affecting the environment, including toxic chemicals, water quality, invasive species, land use, fisheries, and global change.  SERC also explains environmental science in innovative ways that change how people view the biosphere and inspire them to take an active role in sustainable stewardship of the Earth.   SERC leads networks of research and education extending across both coasts of the U.S. and around the planet.

What does SERC do?

Our strategic and master plans seek to discover solutions to unprecedented environmental impacts and change in the Anthropocene Period – the age of humans – which urgently require pragmatic management decisions based on sound science:

• Lead research on global change, pollution by toxic chemicals and nutrients, land-use management, over-fishing, and invasive species in coastal ecosystems.
• Lead Smithsonian signature programs on ecosystems for:
• Global Earth Observatory networks (GEO) for forest ecosystems (Forest GEO) and coastal marine ecosystems (Marine GEO).
• Conservation Commons through preservation and restoration of crucial forests and coastal ecosystems.
• Biogenomics through applications of genomic tools in ecology.
• Lead development and implementation of Participatory Science linked tightly to the Smithsonian’s and SERC's research networks and partnerships.
• Develop facilities and manage SERC’s site on Chesapeake Bay as a unique research platform and model for landscape sustainability, integrating research, education, and stewardship for environmental resources.
• Develop SERC resources and facilities for workshops and conferences to convene the best minds across disciplines to solve the toughest environmental problems.

Our work is urgent - the world’s coastal zones are home to more than 70 percent of the global population and experience intensive economic activity.  The rate of environmental change and the complex interactions of human impacts are accelerating at an alarming rate. Since its founding nearly 50 years ago, SERC has been conducting world-class, peer-reviewed research to understand the causes and consequences to accelerating environmental change.

Priority Actions and Solutions

We seek to provide solutions to urgent environmental issues in the daily news.  Our research provides a river of positive examples:

• Reduction of mercury pollution into the food chain and seafood
• One of the few successful models in the world of science-informed fishery recovery and management
• Valuation and measures of carbon sequestration of coastal ecosystems
• Land management strategies for reduction of nutrient pollution
• Effective strategies for coastal shoreline stabilization
• Conservation of declining coastal fish stocks, such as river herring
• Invasive species management: Ship ballast water management; national data bases of invasive species
• Operational knowledge of crucial ecosystems: forests, wetlands, estuaries, mangroves
• Integration of information across landscapes and networks to advise managers, like the Chesapeake Bay Program

We seek to inform, educate and engage people in science-based solutions for the environment:

• Nationally and internationally recognized Intern, graduate and post-doctoral  student programs train the next generation of research scientists and natural resource managers
• Participatory Science to gather new data and to engage them in the process of using science effectively for answers.
• Engage our world-class science with business leaders, policy makers, natural resource managers, educators, lawyers, and conservationists for the benefit of society.

SERC seeks to expand opportunities to serve as a highly recognized “off-the-Mall” learning site of the Smithsonian Institution as both a geographic destination that is easily accessible from the nation’s capital and a virtual destination that is globally accessible. By expanding SERC’s professional training facilities, realizing the potential of its environmental research and education, and restoring its historic gateway structure to engage visitors, SERC’s participation in the Smithsonian Campaign will provide science-based knowledge to meet critical environmental challenges.

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EPA Research

• Strategic Research Planning at EPA

Office of Research and Development's Strategic Plan

The primary focus of EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD) is to provide the strong scientific and technical foundation the Agency relies on to fulfill its statutory obligations and help Agency, state, and other partners address their most pressing environmental and related public health challenges.

Our strategic research planning ensures a collaborative, transparent, and highly coordinated research program that delivers the data and information that Agency program and regional offices need, while also providing a suite of innovative models, interactive dashboards, tools, and other resources that help states, local communities, and other partners protect their environment, safeguard public health, and increase human well-being. 

Like environmental science itself, ORD’s strategic research planning is constantly changing to build on its foundation of past success while adapting to meet new and more complex challenges. That effort is outlined below.

• ORD Strategic Plan 2018-2022

Research Planning: Supporting Agency Goals and the Administrator’s Priorities

EPA’s collective research effort is guided by the EPA Strategic Plan , which identifies the Agency’s major goals and highlights the Administrator’s core philosophies. Science is an explicit part of the plan, and a critical component of achieving the goals and core philosophies outlined.

As per the  EPA Strategic Plan , ORD’s research planning aligns six National Research Programs to collectively target the science and engineering needed to “deliver a cleaner, safer, and healthier environment for all Americans and future generations,” support “more effective partnerships” between Agency researchers and state environmental and public health agencies, and “refocus the EPA’s robust research and scientific analysis to inform policy making.”

• EPA Strategic Plan FY 2018-2022

Strategic Research Action Planning: Partnership and Consensus

Each National Research Program is guided by a Strategic Research Action Plan (StRAP), a blue print to structure and coordinate research activities. To develop each StRAP, program leaders and staff engage Agency program offices and external partners and stakeholders in open communications to identify the environmental and public health challenges they face. Then, StRAP-development-teams carefully align research and technical activities to ensure they deliver the specific research products, models, tools, and other outputs required to meet those challenges.

By cultivating such partnerships and facilitating ongoing communication between EPA’s ORD and its partners, the Agency has produced an overall research program that can incorporate user-feedback to fine-tune ongoing research. Working closely with partners also facilitates the translation of results in ways that make them immediately applicable to decisions and activities ensuring chemical safety and advancing clean air, land, and water.

A renewed emphasis for the current effort is to more fully engage with state partners through a Memorandum of Understanding between ORD and the Environmental Council of States to meet state research needs and advance the Agency’s priority for more effective partnerships.

• Strategic Research Action Plans FY 2019-2022  

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Research Topics & Ideas: Environment

100+ Environmental Science Research Topics & Ideas

Finding and choosing a strong research topic is the critical first step when it comes to crafting a high-quality dissertation, thesis or research project. Here, we’ll explore a variety research ideas and topic thought-starters related to various environmental science disciplines, including ecology, oceanography, hydrology, geology, soil science, environmental chemistry, environmental economics, and environmental ethics.

NB – This is just the start…

The topic ideation and evaluation process has multiple steps . In this post, we’ll kickstart the process by sharing some research topic ideas within the environmental sciences. This is the starting point though. To develop a well-defined research topic, you’ll need to identify a clear and convincing research gap , along with a well-justified plan of action to fill that gap.

If you’re new to the oftentimes perplexing world of research, or if this is your first time undertaking a formal academic research project, be sure to check out our free dissertation mini-course. Also be sure to also sign up for our free webinar that explores how to develop a high-quality research topic from scratch.

Overview: Environmental Topics

• Ecology /ecological science
• Atmospheric science
• Oceanography
• Soil science
• Environmental chemistry
• Environmental economics
• Environmental ethics
• Examples  of dissertations and theses

Topics & Ideas: Ecological Science

• The impact of land-use change on species diversity and ecosystem functioning in agricultural landscapes
• The role of disturbances such as fire and drought in shaping arid ecosystems
• The impact of climate change on the distribution of migratory marine species
• Investigating the role of mutualistic plant-insect relationships in maintaining ecosystem stability
• The effects of invasive plant species on ecosystem structure and function
• The impact of habitat fragmentation caused by road construction on species diversity and population dynamics in the tropics
• The role of ecosystem services in urban areas and their economic value to a developing nation
• The effectiveness of different grassland restoration techniques in degraded ecosystems
• The impact of land-use change through agriculture and urbanisation on soil microbial communities in a temperate environment
• The role of microbial diversity in ecosystem health and nutrient cycling in an African savannah

Topics & Ideas: Atmospheric Science

• The impact of climate change on atmospheric circulation patterns above tropical rainforests
• The role of atmospheric aerosols in cloud formation and precipitation above cities with high pollution levels
• The impact of agricultural land-use change on global atmospheric composition
• Investigating the role of atmospheric convection in severe weather events in the tropics
• The impact of urbanisation on regional and global atmospheric ozone levels
• The impact of sea surface temperature on atmospheric circulation and tropical cyclones
• The impact of solar flares on the Earth’s atmospheric composition
• The impact of climate change on atmospheric turbulence and air transportation safety
• The impact of stratospheric ozone depletion on atmospheric circulation and climate change
• The role of atmospheric rivers in global water supply and sea-ice formation

Topics & Ideas: Oceanography

• The impact of ocean acidification on kelp forests and biogeochemical cycles
• The role of ocean currents in distributing heat and regulating desert rain
• The impact of carbon monoxide pollution on ocean chemistry and biogeochemical cycles
• Investigating the role of ocean mixing in regulating coastal climates
• The impact of sea level rise on the resource availability of low-income coastal communities
• The impact of ocean warming on the distribution and migration patterns of marine mammals
• The impact of ocean deoxygenation on biogeochemical cycles in the arctic
• The role of ocean-atmosphere interactions in regulating rainfall in arid regions
• The impact of ocean eddies on global ocean circulation and plankton distribution
• The role of ocean-ice interactions in regulating the Earth’s climate and sea level

Tops & Ideas: Hydrology

• The impact of agricultural land-use change on water resources and hydrologic cycles in temperate regions
• The impact of agricultural groundwater availability on irrigation practices in the global south
• The impact of rising sea-surface temperatures on global precipitation patterns and water availability
• Investigating the role of wetlands in regulating water resources for riparian forests
• The impact of tropical ranches on river and stream ecosystems and water quality
• The impact of urbanisation on regional and local hydrologic cycles and water resources for agriculture
• The role of snow cover and mountain hydrology in regulating regional agricultural water resources
• The impact of drought on food security in arid and semi-arid regions
• The role of groundwater recharge in sustaining water resources in arid and semi-arid environments
• The impact of sea level rise on coastal hydrology and the quality of water resources

Topics & Ideas: Geology

• The impact of tectonic activity on the East African rift valley
• The role of mineral deposits in shaping ancient human societies
• The impact of sea-level rise on coastal geomorphology and shoreline evolution
• Investigating the role of erosion in shaping the landscape and impacting desertification
• The impact of mining on soil stability and landslide potential
• The impact of volcanic activity on incoming solar radiation and climate
• The role of geothermal energy in decarbonising the energy mix of megacities
• The impact of Earth’s magnetic field on geological processes and solar wind
• The impact of plate tectonics on the evolution of mammals
• The role of the distribution of mineral resources in shaping human societies and economies, with emphasis on sustainability

Topics & Ideas: Soil Science

• The impact of dam building on soil quality and fertility
• The role of soil organic matter in regulating nutrient cycles in agricultural land
• The impact of climate change on soil erosion and soil organic carbon storage in peatlands
• Investigating the role of above-below-ground interactions in nutrient cycling and soil health
• The impact of deforestation on soil degradation and soil fertility
• The role of soil texture and structure in regulating water and nutrient availability in boreal forests
• The impact of sustainable land management practices on soil health and soil organic matter
• The impact of wetland modification on soil structure and function
• The role of soil-atmosphere exchange and carbon sequestration in regulating regional and global climate
• The impact of salinization on soil health and crop productivity in coastal communities

Topics & Ideas: Environmental Chemistry

• The impact of cobalt mining on water quality and the fate of contaminants in the environment
• The role of atmospheric chemistry in shaping air quality and climate change
• The impact of soil chemistry on nutrient availability and plant growth in wheat monoculture
• Investigating the fate and transport of heavy metal contaminants in the environment
• The impact of climate change on biochemical cycling in tropical rainforests
• The impact of various types of land-use change on biochemical cycling
• The role of soil microbes in mediating contaminant degradation in the environment
• The impact of chemical and oil spills on freshwater and soil chemistry
• The role of atmospheric nitrogen deposition in shaping water and soil chemistry
• The impact of over-irrigation on the cycling and fate of persistent organic pollutants in the environment

Topics & Ideas: Environmental Economics

• The impact of climate change on the economies of developing nations
• The role of market-based mechanisms in promoting sustainable use of forest resources
• The impact of environmental regulations on economic growth and competitiveness
• Investigating the economic benefits and costs of ecosystem services for African countries
• The impact of renewable energy policies on regional and global energy markets
• The role of water markets in promoting sustainable water use in southern Africa
• The impact of land-use change in rural areas on regional and global economies
• The impact of environmental disasters on local and national economies
• The role of green technologies and innovation in shaping the zero-carbon transition and the knock-on effects for local economies
• The impact of environmental and natural resource policies on income distribution and poverty of rural communities

Topics & Ideas: Environmental Ethics

• The ethical foundations of environmentalism and the environmental movement regarding renewable energy
• The role of values and ethics in shaping environmental policy and decision-making in the mining industry
• The impact of cultural and religious beliefs on environmental attitudes and behaviours in first world countries
• Investigating the ethics of biodiversity conservation and the protection of endangered species in palm oil plantations
• The ethical implications of sea-level rise for future generations and vulnerable coastal populations
• The role of ethical considerations in shaping sustainable use of natural forest resources
• The impact of environmental justice on marginalized communities and environmental policies in Asia
• The ethical implications of environmental risks and decision-making under uncertainty
• The role of ethics in shaping the transition to a low-carbon, sustainable future for the construction industry
• The impact of environmental values on consumer behaviour and the marketplace: a case study of the ‘bring your own shopping bag’ policy

Examples: Real Dissertation & Thesis Topics

While the ideas we’ve presented above are a decent starting point for finding a research topic, they are fairly generic and non-specific. So, it helps to look at actual dissertations and theses to see how this all comes together.

Below, we’ve included a selection of research projects from various environmental science-related degree programs to help refine your thinking. These are actual dissertations and theses, written as part of Master’s and PhD-level programs, so they can provide some useful insight as to what a research topic looks like in practice.

• The physiology of microorganisms in enhanced biological phosphorous removal (Saunders, 2014)
• The influence of the coastal front on heavy rainfall events along the east coast (Henson, 2019)
• Forage production and diversification for climate-smart tropical and temperate silvopastures (Dibala, 2019)
• Advancing spectral induced polarization for near surface geophysical characterization (Wang, 2021)
• Assessment of Chromophoric Dissolved Organic Matter and Thamnocephalus platyurus as Tools to Monitor Cyanobacterial Bloom Development and Toxicity (Hipsher, 2019)
• Evaluating the Removal of Microcystin Variants with Powdered Activated Carbon (Juang, 2020)
• The effect of hydrological restoration on nutrient concentrations, macroinvertebrate communities, and amphibian populations in Lake Erie coastal wetlands (Berg, 2019)
• Utilizing hydrologic soil grouping to estimate corn nitrogen rate recommendations (Bean, 2019)
• Fungal Function in House Dust and Dust from the International Space Station (Bope, 2021)
• Assessing Vulnerability and the Potential for Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA) in Sudan’s Blue Nile Basin (Mohamed, 2022)
• A Microbial Water Quality Analysis of the Recreational Zones in the Los Angeles River of Elysian Valley, CA (Nguyen, 2019)
• Dry Season Water Quality Study on Three Recreational Sites in the San Gabriel Mountains (Vallejo, 2019)
• Wastewater Treatment Plan for Unix Packaging Adjustment of the Potential Hydrogen (PH) Evaluation of Enzymatic Activity After the Addition of Cycle Disgestase Enzyme (Miessi, 2020)
• Laying the Genetic Foundation for the Conservation of Longhorn Fairy Shrimp (Kyle, 2021).

Looking at these titles, you can probably pick up that the research topics here are quite specific and narrowly-focused , compared to the generic ones presented earlier. To create a top-notch research topic, you will need to be precise and target a specific context with specific variables of interest . In other words, you’ll need to identify a clear, well-justified research gap.

Need more help?

If you’re still feeling a bit unsure about how to find a research topic for your environmental science dissertation or research project, be sure to check out our private coaching services below, as well as our Research Topic Kickstarter .

Need a helping hand?

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11 Comments

research topics on climate change and environment

I wish to learn things in a more advanced but simple way and with the hopes that I am in the right place.

Thank so much for the research topics. It really helped

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Research topics on environmental geology

Thanks for the research topics….I need a research topic on Geography

hi I need research questions ideas

Implications of climate variability on wildlife conservation on the west coast of Cameroon

I want the research on environmental planning and management

I want a topic on environmental sustainability

It good coaching

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Earth and Environmental Systems Sciences Division Strategic Plan

The Environmental System Science (ESS) program is part of the Earth and Environmental Systems Sciences Division (EESSD) within DOE’s Biological and Environmental Research (BER) Program. EESSD has a strategic plan covering the period 2018–2023.

This plan highlights five scientific grand challenges that outline science needs for basic research addressing key uncertainties in the understanding of Earth system components, as well complex uncertainties that arise from the interactions and interdependencies of these components in the coupled Earth system. Research supported by ESS contributes to achieving these grand challenges:

• Integrated Water Cycle. Advance understanding of the integrated water cycle by studying relevant processes involving the atmospheric, terrestrial, oceanic, and human system components and their interactions and feedbacks across scales, thereby improving the predictability of the water cycle and reducing associated uncertainties in response to perturbations.
• Biogeochemistry. Advance a robust, predictive understanding of coupled biogeochemical processes and cycles across spatial and temporal scales by investigating natural and anthropogenic interactions and feedbacks and their associated uncertainties within Earth and environmental systems.
• High Latitudes. Understand and quantify the drivers, interactions, and feedbacks both among the high-latitude components and between the high latitudes and the global system to reduce uncertainties and improve predictive understanding of high-latitude systems and their global impacts.
• Drivers and Responses in the Earth System. Advance next-generation understanding of Earth system drivers and their effects on the integrated Earth-energy-human system.
• Observation-Model Integration. Develop a broad range of interconnected infrastructure capabilities and tools that support the integration and management of models, experiments, and observations across a hierarchy of scales and complexity to address EESSD scientific grand challenges.

EESSD Mission

To enhance the seasonal to multidecadal predictability of the Earth system using long-term field experiments, DOE user facilities, modeling and simulation, uncertainty characterization, best-in-class computing, process research, and data analytics and management.

EESSD Vision

To develop an improved capability for Earth system prediction on seasonal to multidecadal time scales to inform the development of resilient U.S. energy strategies.

Download the Strategic Plan

• U.S. DOE. 2018. Climate and Environmental Sciences Division Strategic Plan 2018–2023, DOE/SC–0192, U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science ( science.osti.gov/-/media/ber/pdf/workshop-reports/2018_CESD_Strategic_Plan.pdf ).

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NOAA GLERL Strategic Plan 2024-2028

A message from the director:.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Great Lake Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL) was created in 1974 to “conduct research directed toward an understanding of the environmental processes in the Great Lakes and their watersheds.” As one of sixteen laboratories and programs within NOAA’s research division—Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR)—our freshwater focus on Great Lakes, large lakes of the world, and coastal ecosystems makes us unique among NOAA OAR laboratories and programs. Our research contributes to the products and services that protect lives and livelihoods, the economy, and the environment of the Great Lakes region.

The Great Lakes basin is a vital freshwater resource that spans across U.S. and Canadian borders and enriches the lives of more than 34 million people who live, work, and recreate in the region. Our awareness and understanding of the fragile, complex, and interconnected nature of the Great Lakes is now more important than ever. As we look ahead, we must recognize the uncertainty that the dynamic forces of human-induced stressors and a changing climate bring to our work. NOAA’s commitment to protecting and securing Great Lakes water and resources for future generations will not waiver. Our science, service, and stewardship will continue to contribute to an awareness and understanding that spans across the region.

The science program at GLERL is foundational to and interwoven across the core NOAA mission and is guided by OAR’s goals—as described in the OAR Strategy 2020-2026 —to explore the marine environment; detect changes in the ocean, Great Lakes, and atmosphere; make better forecasts; and drive innovation. Our approach to scientific research—integrated around physical, chemical, and biological interactions—serves as a framework to address the complex environmental challenges posed by a large-lake system in a state of flux, as well as a model for other freshwater and coastal ecosystems. Looking forward, we are strengthening our programs in ‘omics, uncrewed systems, Great Lakes acidification, and stakeholder engagement. In the years ahead, we will continue to enhance our science program through partnerships and collaborations within the private sector, and greater integration into academia.

This strategic plan outlines GLERL’s strategies, goals, and objectives for the next five years. We are poised to embrace future needs by building lasting partnerships, providing innovations in observing technology, leading cutting-edge experimental research, developing advanced ecosystem models, communicating science-based products and services, and contributing sound science to the Great Lakes management community.

Deborah H. Lee Director, NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory

Download the NOAA GLERL Strategic Plan, Implemetation Plan, and Supplemental Information:

• Strategic Plan
• Implementation Plan
• Supplemental Information

Supplementary Materials

• GLERL History
• GLERL Establishing Legislation and Authority
• NOAA Next Generation Strategic Plan
• Appendix B - 2010 Review Recommendations and Response
• Appendix C - Logic Models

Research to Protect, Restore, and Manage the Environment (1993)

Chapter: 5 recommendations, 5 recommendations.

The committee reached two fundamental conclusions–that cultural changes must be made in the nation's environmental research programs, regardless of how these programs are organized, and that organizational changes would facilitate the implementation of the cultural changes. The committee uses the term culture to refer to the institutionalized beliefs, values, policies, and practices that characterize the administration of an agency's environmental research program and the nation's overall effort. For example, it refers to an agency's use of intramural research versus extramural research and to an agency's focus on mission-oriented research, rather than on research with potentially broader applications. With respect to a national environmental research program, it refers to the development of agency research programs with minimal reference to the cognate work in other agencies and with minimal consideration of the fit of the research in a coordinated national effort to address environmental problems.

We believe that our recommendations for changes can improve the effectiveness of our environmental research effort, no matter what new organizational arrangements might be made. Implementation of the cultural changes should be systemic, that is, they should used throughout the government environmental research system.

The committee presents its recommended cultural changes and four organizational frameworks to implement them. Framework A, current agency structure with enhancements, preserves in large part the identity and functions of existing agencies, but adds some new offices that are essential if the desirable characteristics stated in Chapter 4 are to be put into effect and the critical cultural changes implemented. Framework B is the proposal of the Committee for the National Institute for the Environment that our committee considered as part of our charge. Framework C is a different institute as visualized by our committee–a National Institute for Environmental Research. Framework D is a Department of the Environment.

In describing the cultural and organizational changes, we have avoided details because the legislative and executive branches that have the responsibility and authority to act on the suggestions for change should decide on the details. We have tried to convey the reasoning process that began with an examination of current federal environmental research, proceeded to a description of the desirable characteristics of a program, and concluded with recommended cultural and organizational changes required to achieve the desirable characteristics. We hope that the reasoning will inform the national discussions about how parts of the federal government could be organized to address the aggregate environmental issues facing the nation today. A concluding section of this chapter describes the advantages and disadvantages of the organizational frameworks.

The following are the committee's two chief recommendations:

The cultural changes in the nation's environmental program described below must be implemented if today's and tomorrow's environmental problems are to be addressed. The cultural changes are required, regardless of which organizational structure is decided on.

At a minimum, Framework A (current agency structure with enhancements) should be implemented. If the nation is to make marked improvements in the quality and strength of its environmental research and policy, we urge that the Department of the Environment described in Framework D be established.

CULTURAL CHANGES

The cultural changes we recommend will strengthen the nation's environmental research, correct specific weaknesses, and recognize that research should enlarge our comprehension of and ability to observe the components of the environment, deepen our understanding of how transfers of energy and materials occur among components, and improve our knowledge of the interactions among components. Fundamental advances in knowledge and understanding are needed to grasp and solve urgent environmental problems.

Chapter 4 describes the desirable characteristics of an effective national environmental research program. These desirable characteristics were used by the committee as it defined the necessary cultural changes. Among the most important expectations are a focus on protection, restoration, and management of natural resources as the critical directions for environmental

research; improvements in how environmental research is approached, for example, through an understanding of fundamental processes and multidisciplinary and multiscale research strategies; high-level commitment to and coordination of federal environmental research; a national agenda or plan for environmental research; a data-collection and data-management system supporting a continuous and integrated program to measure status and trends in the nation's and world's environmental condition; a strong linkage between environmental research and policy; and a mechanism to make environmental information easily and widely available.

RESEARCH DIRECTED TO PROTECTION, RESTORATION, AND MANAGEMENT

Our recommendations for environmental research are predicated on the goal of sustainable environmental and economic systems. We can achieve this goal through protection of resources so that they will not be damaged and become unavailable for use, through restoration of resources that have been mismanaged and damaged, and by taking responsibility for management of resources, including natural, economic, cultural, and human resources. Reliable information must be obtained if we are to make the best decisions about how to protect, restore, and manage resources, and this information can be obtained from an environmental research program that meets the recommendations in this report.

The committee recommends that environmental research advance the social goals of protecting the environment for present and future generations, restoring damaged environmental functions so that they are once more ecologically productive, and managing our natural, economic, cultural, and human resources in ways that encourage the sustainable use of the environment.

In advancing those three goals, environmental research should, first, collect and analyze information needed in and outside government to pursue the goals; second, improve our knowledge of the fundamental processes that shape the natural world and the human behavior that affects that world; and, third, apply the knowledge to solving environmental problems with a comprehensive management strategy in the context of economic and social needs.

The terms protection, restoration , and management refer to directions in which environmental action should proceed; they should not be taken to imply absolute goals.

NATIONAL-LEVEL LEADERSHIP AND COORDINATION

Setting the directions for environmental research and coordinating responsibilities among various federal agencies must be done at the executive level because it is of national importance. This setting of national directions must include not only the presence of an official at the highest level of the administration, because it is a national priority, but also the participation of those who are responsible for the agencies that will be conducting the federal program. Because the federal program will operate within the context of the entire national environmental research program, which must include the efforts of state governments and the private sector, and because the program must be ultimately accountable to and responsive to the public, there should also be linkages to these communities, perhaps through a system of advisory committees.

The committee recommends the establishment of a National Environmental Council in the executive office of the president to be chaired by the vice president. It should be composed of the heads of the federal environmental agencies. Advisory committees for the council should be established to represent the scientific community, the public, state government and the private sector. The council should provide national leadership and coordination among the federal agencies for environmental research and oversee implementation of the National Environmental Plan.

NATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL PLAN FOR RESEARCH

There are many potential demands on the nation's resources and many competing ideas about relative priorities for a program of environmental research. Duplication of effort or omissions in a research program can occur in an effort as important and complex as environmental research. A number of constituencies have a right and deserve to play a role in setting the priorities. We believe it is essential to have a comprehensive national plan for environmental research.

The committee recommends the development of a National Environmental Research Plan that will form the basis for coordinating environmental research responsibilities of federal agencies. The plan, which identifies the nation's environmental research agenda and the responsibilities of the individual agencies, should be updated every 2 years and comprehensively reconsidered every 5 years in the expectation that it will evolve. The National Environmental Council should take primary responsibility for ensuring that the plan is developed. In doing so, it should reach out, through the use of appropriate advisory committees, to the states, the private sector, nongovernment organizations, and the academic research community to ensure their participation in developing the plan and thereby to encourage them to participate in implementing it.

Our plan differs from the National Environmental Strategy recommended by the National Commission on the Environment (NCE, 1993) in that the latter focuses on policy issues, such as economic incentives to improve the environment, whereas our plan concentrates solely on research. The two might be used to complement one another.

LINKAGE OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND POLICY

Among the most important roles of environmental research is creation of a foundation of sound information on which to base the policies that are necessary to protect, restore, and manage the nation's environmental resources. However, the link between environmental data and information and their use in decision-making is now weak within agencies and almost absent when larger issues that cross agency boundaries are in question. Linkages between science and decisions need to be strengthened at both levels. It would be highly advantageous to establish a two-part effort to ensure that the best scientific information is translated into strong and defensible policies for protection, restoration, and management. The two-part effort would be in addition to the present case, in which each federal agency assesses environmental data to develop policy applicable to its own mission needs.

We recommend the establishment of an Environmental Assessment Center in which large environmental issues that cross

agency mission boundaries can be assessed and policy options developed.

We recommend that an official (and staff) of this center serve as an environmental ''intelligence officer" whose task will be to convey the policy options to decision-makers in the National Environmental Council, to Congress, and to other involved parties. It would be advantageous if the center were represented also on the president's National Security Council and Economic Council, in recognition that decisions on environmental issues strongly influence national security and the national economy.

PERFORMANCE OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH

Fundamental changes must be made in how environmental research is conducted and used within the federal research enterprise.

We recommend the following essential changes to strengthen the nation's environmental research:

Fundamental advances in understanding and in factual knowledge are needed if we are to grasp and to solve urgent environmental problems. Research should enlarge our comprehension of and ability to observe the components of the environment, deepen our understanding of how transfers of energy and materials occur among those components, and improve our knowledge of the interactions among components.

The current strength of disciplinary research must be maintained, but more research must be multiscale and multidisciplinary to match the characteristics of the phenomena that we seek to understand. Research must cross the boundaries of mission agencies for the same reason. It must be international in scope, foster collaboration between public and private sectors, and include the valuable contributions of state environmental organizations and nongovernment organizations.

Research must be economical. It must be of high quality. It must have stable funding bases. It should be pluralistic in approach and be supported by multiple funding strategies with proper regard for balance between intramural and peer-reviewed extramural support. It must provide for the support and training of the next generation of scientists while providing for appropriate

development of instrumentation and facilities for research. Only in that way can the nation's environmental research be efficient in solving problems and effective in contributing to international competitiveness and economic strength.

DISCIPLINARY BALANCE

As environmental research has evolved, substantial imbalance in emphasis has developed. Physical-science research has been emphasized to a greater degree than biology, and both the physical sciences and biology have fared better than the social sciences and engineering. We believe that a more balanced program will be important in the future. Although imbalance in funding patterns is evident, we are concerned primarily about asymmetry in program emphasis and in intellectual leadership.

The case for more emphasis on biology is clear. We have a modest understanding of the physical environmental world, but we are only beginning to understand the fragile biological world and our interactions with it. The role of biodiversity and the potentially serious consequences of its loss are only beginning to be perceived. Loss of species that we depend on for the flow of environmental goods to feed, clothe, and warm us has the potential to threaten human life itself. We must do more to understand these problems.

The case for the social sciences is also clear. It is humans who damage the environment, and it is humans whose reactions determine the success or failure of laws and regulations designed to protect the environment. Until we understand human actions and interactions sufficiently to guarantee the success of environmental protection and restoration measures, we will not know how to design these measures. Furthermore, the overwhelmingly complex problems of designing sustainable economic-development policies must be solved before the developing world can enjoy our standard of living without destroying the environment the world over.

The case for environmental engineering is evident in the economics of environmental remediation and restoration, if nowhere else. With chemical and radiological hazardous-waste cleanup estimated to cost many billions of dollars, with inadequate technologies available for that cleanup, and with inadequate research seeking better technology, the need for attention to environmental engineering is obvious.

The committee recommends that all relevant environmental disciplines be supported and that additional emphasis be placed on the biological and social sciences and on engineering.

MULTIDISCIPLINARY BALANCE

Research on environmental phenomena has depended heavily on disciplinary research to study individual components of the phenomena with well-established disciplinary methods. The clear value of this approach is well appreciated, and it must certainly be continued. However, biological and physical processes and functions within environmental systems often depend on separate but interacting phenomena that work across disciplinary boundaries and across different spatial scales–from the molecular and cellular to the environmental landscape–and varied time scales from rapid chemical reactions to long-term biotic and abiotic effects. A more complete understanding of environmental processes will depend on examining the interactions of myriad biological, physical, and social events. Often that will require knowledge from different disciplines. For example, the physical phenomena of variations in ion transport and balance in porous media, such as soil, influence the physiological characteristics of a microorganism; understanding of bacterial ecology will depend on understanding of the physical factors that influence the bacteria. In many cases of environmental research, multidisciplinary studies are essential for addressing problems that extend across disciplines and across different spatial and temporal scales.

The committee recommends continued emphasis on disciplinary research supporting the protection, restoration, and management of ecological systems resources and increased emphasis on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research with the same goals.

MISSION-AGENCY BALANCE AND USE OF EXTRAMURAL FUNDING MECHANISMS

Mission and sector agencies that have environmental responsibilities should themselves carry out environmental research of sufficient quality, amount, and kind to support their agency goals, to permit them to collaborate with other agencies that have environmental responsibilities, and to keep the agencies alert to and applying the findings of environmental research from all sources. Some agencies conduct research largely intramurally. Some (for example, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency) contract extensively with extramural institutions other than colleges, universities, and research institutions. The committee believes that there would be major advantages of placing additional

emphasis on support of extramural research at the nation's academic research institutions. They have shown themselves to be exceptionally productive partners in conducting research. More advantage should be taken of the nation's academic researchers in performing environmental research. The effective and proven procedures used by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation are models for how awards to these investigators might be decided on.

The committee recommends that mission and sector agencies substantially expand their extramurally funded research programs, creating such programs where appropriate. These should provide maximal opportunity for the nation's academic and other nonfederal researchers to avail themselves of national environmental research opportunities. The principles of competitively awarded, peer-reviewed, investigator-initiated awards should be applied.

CONTINUOUS MONITORING OF THE NATION'S ENVIRONMENTAL STATUS

The United States has a wealth of natural resources. Although this wealth must be used to support the quality of human life, the use of the resources must be managed in a way that they are sustained for future generations. It is therefore necessary that we know the status of and changes in the resources if we are to protect, restore, and manage them. Many agencies have legal responsibility for different components of the resources, so it is necessary to have a coordinated program among the agencies for measuring the status and trends of the resources.

We recommend the initiation of the National Environmental Status and Trends Program to be coordinated by the National Environmental Council to function as an integrated cooperative program among the federal agencies to inventory and monitor the status and trends of the nation's natural resources. A national biological survey of appropriate scope would be a valuable addition to the existing programs and an important component of the status and trends program.

ORGANIZING ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION AND MAKING IT AVAILABLE

Information is the currency of a strong environmental research program that will inform the best policies and practices for protecting, restoring, and managing the nation's resources. Increasing technological developments have increased our ability both to collect information and to manage it. Many agencies, individuals, and institutions contribute to the ever-increasing amount of information. There must be a system to organize and manage this information and make it available for the integrated use of the biological, physical, social, and engineering sciences. The details of such a system are in Chapter 4 .

We recommend the establishment of a National Environmental Data and Information System to be coordinated by the National Environmental Council and conducted by the federal agencies with the best available technology to collect and make available and easily accessible a wide range of environmental data from the biological, physical, social, and engineering sciences.

ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION AND INFORMATION

The importance of developing sustainable environmental systems for future generations–and thus for making the best decisions for protecting, restoring, and managing these resources–is so great that both this generation and the coming ones must be informed. Educational opportunities must be provided at every level from kindergarten to graduate school. Citizens who know more about the environment can play a more useful role in solving environmental problems. Moreover, environmental research that will provide the base for the decisions requires sophisticated scientists with expertise in disciplinary and interdisciplinary science.

We recommend that programs be established, and present ones expanded, for educating the next generation of environmental scientists and engineers and developing increased understanding of environmental issues in the general population and that information about environmental matters be built into educational programs at all levels.

ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGES

Implementation of the cultural-change recommendations listed above is imperative, regardless of which organizational changes are made in the federal structure for the administration of environmental research. The cultural changes will go far toward improving protection, restoration, and management of our resources. Organizational changes can enhance the implementation of the cultural changes. Framework A conserves the current configuration and structure of federal agencies and adds offices to enhance the ability to implement the cultural changes, but it does not meet all the needs for the future. Framework D is a Department of the Environment that does meet those needs. Frameworks B and C are included in this discussion to show the spectrum of alternatives considered by the committee.

FRAMEWORK A: CURRENT AGENCY STRUCTURE WITH ENHANCEMENTS

Description.

The object of Framework A is to conserve the identity and placement of federal agencies; that is, no far-reaching organizational change in federal-agency organization is called for. Nevertheless, the cultural changes recommended above must be instituted if the nation is to improve its ability to address pressing environmental problems, and several essential new offices are recommended in Framework A to perform functions required to implement the cultural changes. With refinement and strengthening of the individual federal agencies' programs, full implementation of the cultural changes will lead to substantial improvements in the nation's environmental research program.

Agencies Incorporated

By definition, Framework A conserves the current organizational structure of the federal agencies. No major organizational alterations are required.

Figure 1 Framework A: Current agency structure with enhancements.

Relationships Among the Agencies

Framework A, to a greater extent than any of the other frameworks, requires the existence of a National Environmental Plan (NEP) and a National Environmental Council (NEC). The success of this framework depends on coordination of effort among agencies; no new agency with a single focus on the environment is created. It would be the responsibility of the NEC to ensure that the agencies cooperate and coordinate their efforts so that they have the following characteristics.

The offices within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Energy (DOE), the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of the Interior (DOI) that are involved in environmental research would be encouraged, under the direction of the NEC, to focus on the environment to a greater degree and to adopt the cultural changes that we have recommended. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), whose programs are already focused on the environment, would continue to play a large role in the coordinated program.

Many missions overlap among current agency assignments for environmental research. There are also gaps–subjects not adequately addressed–and cases where agencies are not properly staffed or supported to meet their environmental responsibilities. The NEC should seek to eliminate duplication of effort among the various sector and mission agencies and, where work along similar lines is necessary for the individual missions, to ensure that work is well coordinated. Monitoring activities–such as EPA's Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program, the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Long-Term Ecological Research program, and DOI's Gap Analysis Program and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) programs–could be better coordinated to increase their combined value for understanding environmental status. Environmental-engineering research and remediation and restoration activities are distributed among DOE, DOD, DOI, EPA, and NSF; far greater integration of their efforts should be achieved.

Basic-Research Emphasis

Each agency would be expected to increase funding for investigator-initiated extramural research projects relevant to its mission. Some agencies, such as NSF, would have increased resources for supporting and leading the basic-research effort at the national level and for developing infrastructural

elements, such as education, training, and facilities. The NSF effort is critical to basic research, especially in biology, social sciences, and engineering applications.

Each relevant federal agency should recognize that monitoring the status and trends of natural resources is of such a high priority that programs to accomplish that should be planned and supported. Under the guidance of the NEC, the agencies could devise mechanisms for ensuring that the results of their individual research programs were shared to construct a set of national cumulative databases available for use and interpretation by all agencies. The National Environmental Data and Information System and the National Status and Trends Program described in Chapter 4 could serve as foci for individual agency efforts for the collection and standardization of data relevant to monitoring the status and trends of environmental resources.

Education and Training

Each federal agency should take seriously its responsibility to provide environmental education and training programs. In developing these programs, interagency mechanisms would be established for coordination among and between the agencies and the Department of Education and the NSF Education Directorate. Each federal agency involved with environmental research would be expected to assess the support structure and services provided for environmental research within it and for collaborative research programs with the academic, industrial, and international research communities. Useful models of support for training are the graduate-student support, postdoctoral-fellowship, and career-development programs of the National Institutes of Health that have been so successful in producing highly skilled biomedical scientists.

Education programs at the precollege and undergraduate levels are important to educate an informed populace that can understand and participate in making decisions on complex environmental issues. Each agency must initiate or expand current education programs.

Linkages of Agency Programs to Nonfederal Parties

Environmental research today often depends on sophisticated analytical technologies and techniques for managing complex databases. In many instances, these technologies can be shared and the analyses improved with the participation of nonfederal parties, such as state and local governments and industry. Each agency should be expected to develop programs for involving the academic, industrial, and international research communities in cooperative and integrated environmental research programs.

National Science Foundation

NSF would continue to provide the primary support for basic environmental research. Given a substantially increased budget and responsibility to identify gaps in the programs of departments and agencies, it could help to fill the gaps by initiating programs on its own or by reporting the gaps to the NEC and suggesting actions to remedy them.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

It has been suggested that NOAA could be a more effective performer of environmental research and be in a better position to defend its budget requests before Congress if it were an independent agency. The proposal has merit, but the committee believes that the advantages of making NOAA an independent agency would be only marginal in Framework A because NOAA would still be one of many agencies with relatively small parts of the responsibility for environmental research. Nevertheless, NOAA's contribution to environmental science is substantial, and the agency should be given the resources to continue to be an important partner in the overall environmental research enterprise.

Environmental Protection Agency

EPA must be encouraged and receive the resources to support a strong research program to develop and provide the information necessary for promulgating rational and defensible environmental regulations. If EPA is to play a more central role, it must be successful in implementing changes suggested in the report Safeguarding the Future: Credible Science, Credible

Decisions (EPA, 1992a). Implementation of that report's recommendations would substantially improve the science base at the agency and increase its credibility. The committee believes that the many laws enforced and regulations promulgated by EPA dominate the attention and budgetary decisions of the agency's personnel and make the development of high-quality research programs difficult. Steps should be taken to separate the research and regulatory functions within EPA, so that the research program can grow to provide the necessary science base on which to justify rules and regulations. If the legislation to elevate EPA to department status now being considered by Congress is enacted, it will be particularly important that the new department seriously consider how it might change its approach in accord with the above suggestions.

Other Agencies

As an example of the participation of other agencies, the National Park Service, because of its unique environmental resources for research, would participate in the nation's research program while continuing to develop strong research-based management programs for protecting the integrity of the parks. All agencies would work to reduce intra-agency conflicts that result from mixing concerns for environmental use with concern for protection, for example, in timber harvests of the Forest Service and mining and drilling leases by the Bureau of Mining and Mineral Services.

Mission agencies are important to the success of any federal environmental research program because of the research related to their missions and because they support environmental research programs. In practical terms, that means that agencies should organize their research programs to contain a reasonable balance between directly mission-oriented research and research that meets the criteria of research support in keeping with the recommended cultural changes. A major goal of the NEC should be the encouragement of mission-oriented agencies to develop research programs that both serve their mission goals and add to the store of knowledge about the environment in general.

This country has several hundred federal laboratories, including DOE's contractor-operated national laboratories and laboratories with strong relevance to environmental research that are managed by DOI, USDA, and EPA. Coordination efforts should be directed to using the talents and expertise in these laboratories as part of a system to improve environmental research. Several bills have been considered in Congress to create environmental technology centers at the DOE national laboratories. Those and other

creative uses should be encouraged under the direction of the NEC as it implements the National Environmental Plan. Use of the DOE national laboratories to create and develop technologies that contribute to innovations for management of natural resources is an especially attractive possibility.

Implementation of the Cultural Changes

Research on protection, restoration, and management.

It must be clearly understood that every agency, as it fulfills its mission imperatives, needs to direct its research also to protection, restoration, and management for sustainability. Each agency must approach the research with the aim of gaining understanding through the study of the fundamental components of the environmental systems that it studies, the flows of material and energy between the components, and how components interact. Every agency must try to implement the cultural changes we have recommended.

National Environmental Council

The creation of the NEC is essential. Because of its high-level leadership, its membership of department secretaries, and especially its single focus on the environment, the NEC should be more effective in broadly coordinating federal environmental research than the Federal Coordinating Council on Science, Engineering, and Technology, which has many interests to attend to while the NEC has one–the environment.

One of the NEC's functions would be to coordinate priority-setting for programs and, later, priorities for expenditures among agencies. It would also recommend expenditure levels for environmental research programs. Once high-priority research topics were identified, a process similar to the submission of the current cross-cut budget for the Global Change Research Program to the Office of Management and Budget would be implemented. Advisory mechanisms would need to be used to involve the broader scientific community in developing the details of the environmental research program.

National Environmental Plan

The NEP will provide a map of routes toward goals to which all involved agencies will dedicate some part of their efforts; the NEC will be the driving

force to achieve those goals. Without an agency assigned to be the primary focus for environmental research, there is no natural home for programs on environmental status and trends or for data management. Therefore, the NEC must encourage coordination of the work of many individual agencies in these fields to ensure that the cultural changes come into being.

Environmental Status and Trends Program

The NEC will coordinate an Environmental Status and Trends Program, as included in the cultural changes needed in the nation's environmental program.

National Environmental Data and Information System

The NEC would ensure that the National Environmental Data and Information System is created. Programs now conducted by NOAA, NASA, USGS, DOI, EPA, and the Smithsonian Institution might be the beginning points for creation of the system. Success of the system would depend on the ability of agencies to work together under the direction of the NEC. The identification of a lead agency would enhance the chances that the program would be successful.

Environmental Assessment Center

The connection between research results and policy decisions would continue to be a responsibility within each agency in Framework A. Agencies would focus on improving their mechanisms for collecting information relevant to developing policies within their missions, for assessing the consequences of policy frameworks in keeping with the information base, and for providing information and the associated policy analyses to the appropriate decision-makers.

The Environmental Assessment Center (EAC) would play an important role as the assessor of data on large issues that cross agency boundaries. The EAC would be responsible for communicating the results of its assessments to the NEC and Congress.

FRAMEWORK B: THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AS PROPOSED BY THE COMMITTEE FOR THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT

Framework B is a paraphrase of the proposal of the group of independent scientists who formed the Committee for the National Institute for the Environment (CNIE). The following description of the CNIE proposal is abstracted from the latest information available to the present committee at its last meeting and dated December 8, 1992. The full contents of the December 8, 1992, CNIE letter to this committee (with organizational charts) is in Appendix C to this report. The CNIE proposal continues to evolve; a later version received in January 1993, after this committee's last meeting, contains ideas not reflected below. Consideration of the CNIE proposal was a basic element of the charge to our committee.

The CNIE proposal calls for the establishment of a federal science agency, the National Institute for the Environment (NIE), focused exclusively on environmental research, assessment, information management, and higher education and training. The CNIE believes that NIE is needed because existing agencies and organizations are not meeting critical environmental needs and that NIE would complement and strengthen the existing efforts.

The mission of NIE ''would be to improve the scientific basis for making decisions on environmental issues." To fulfill this mission, the agency would have the goals of

Research to increase understanding of environmental issues by supporting credible, problem-focused interdisciplinary research.

Comprehensive assessment of current environmental knowledge to enhance decision-making.

Enlarging access to environmental information and improving communication of scientific and technological results.

Education and training to strengthen the capacity to address environmental challenges by sponsoring higher education and training in environmental sciences.

It would fund research organized in three broad categories: environmental resources, environmental systems, and environmental sustainability. Extramural-research awards would be made by a variety of mechanisms and based on peer review and competition. The CNIE believes that NIE should

not duplicate existing agency prerogatives with large, in-house research laboratories.

Agencies Involved

NIE would be a new and independent agency and would not incorporate parts or all of any existing federal agency. It is intended to complement, not replace, the research of federal regulatory and resource-management agencies.

Relationship to Other Parties

The CNIE states that NIE's research and training mission would be guided by a governing body that is representative of major stakeholders, including government and nongovernment organizations, academe, and business. NIE would foster cooperation among those sectors in research, education, and training.

NIE would cooperate with international research and training organizations to assist in taking a comprehensive approach to cross-national and global environmental issues.

NIE, as conceived by the CNIE, would have no regulatory or resource-management responsibilities.

Agreement with Cultural Changes Recommended by our Committee

The CNIE's call for better integration of basic and applied science, more extramural research and training, interdisciplinary problem-solving, a comprehensive environmental information program, and an international component to address global changes parallels the recommendations of this committee.

The CNIE plan includes an NIE Office of Assessment and Evaluation to provide continuing assessments of environmental knowledge on particular issues to ensure that decision-makers have access to "user-friendly" alternative interpretations of the implications of results of environmental research.

The CNIE also proposes the establishment of a National Library for the Environment that would cooperate with other groups concerned with environmental information systems and with evaluating the quality of environmental data in databases. The NIE system appears similar in intent to that of the

National Environmental Data and Information System that our committee has described.

No provision is made for the development of a National Environmental Plan to coordinate the efforts of the various parts of the federal government, nor is there a clear indication of a provision for national leadership of the environmental effort.

FRAMEWORK C: A NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH

Framework C is a research institute as defined by this committee. The major organizational innovation in this National Institute for Environmental Research (NIER) is a coherent research program that addresses protection, restoration, and management of resources, as defined in Chapter 4 . The institute we suggest is different from the institute proposed by the Committee for the National Institute for the Environment in some fundamental ways. In particular, creation of this committee's NIER would be coupled with the reduction or incorporation of some other federal agencies' functions. As mentioned above (Framework B), the CNIE proposes a new agency that would complement existing agencies, but not encompass them.

Because no agency focuses on environmental research to the exclusion of other missions, such as land management or regulation, there is no institutional home, comparable with the National Institutes of Health for human health research, for the nurturing of environmental science. NIER would provide such a home. It would also attend to such issues as training of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, development of young investigators, research support for environmental scientists, information management, large-scale programs for monitoring the environment, and formation of relationships among academe, industry, and government for the performance of research.

The institute would be a new, nonregulatory, federal granting agency organized around the mission of understanding the elements of our environment and its processes and fostering research on protection, restoration, and management of resources. It would be the only U.S. agency with a primary objective of sponsoring a coherent program of mission-oriented fundamental and applied environmental research, education, and training directed to protection, restoration, and management of resources. The existing agencies would continue to have major land-management responsibilities,

Figure 2 Framework C: A National Institute for Environmental Research.

and they would benefit from the information gained from the environmental research program undertaken through the institute.

Present government agencies, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), support research that seeks basic knowledge. Subject-specific agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Energy (DOE), support research that applies to problems of the environment, but they are not centered on the environment. In contrast, research sponsored by NIER would seek to understand environmental processes and the interactions of people and the environment so that lasting solutions could be developed.

The research functions of several existing agencies with missions and responsibilities in protection, restoration, and management of resources would be combined in NIER. At its creation, the institute would encompass almost all the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) research; the part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration involved in environmental research, in particular the Earth Observing Satellite/Mission to Planet Earth program; and the research component of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), but not EPA's regulatory functions. The activities of those individual agencies in monitoring, protecting, and providing the fundamental knowledge about means to restore environmental resources should be enhanced by their association in an integrated research institute. The combination of the agencies allows coverage of atmospheric, oceanographic, terrestrial, engineering, and to a smaller extent social aspects of the environmental sciences. The monitoring and data-handling expertise of NOAA and USGS would eminently qualify the institute to be the focus of efforts to follow status and trends in the environment. EPA's monitoring programs would provide an added dimension. National laboratories could be associated with NIER (especially EPA laboratories involved in environmental engineering and DOE national laboratories) to create strong foci for approaching environmental technology questions.

Relationship to Other Agencies

Because of the uneven distribution of disciplinary environmental research across the various federal agencies and the concentration of biological research in the land-management agencies and USDA–which are not part of

the institute described here–the National Environmental Council must coordinate the work of NIER and the excluded agencies to ensure that there are opportunities for interdisciplinary research.

NSF would expand its support of basic research related to the environment. Additional funds provided in the NSF budget for support of all environmental fields–but especially biology, environmental engineering, and social sciences–would lead to the production of data of immediate and long-term use by NIER.

Mission-oriented agencies would continue their traditional work but, under the National Environmental Plan (NEP) and the NEC, would be encouraged to focus to a greater extent on research that would enlarge general knowledge about the environment, as well as satisfying their mission needs.

Land-management agencies must continue to measure environmental status and trends; however, these agencies could provide a broader array of measurements that, with coordination among other agencies, would increase completeness of a database and diminish unnecessary duplication. It would be the responsibility of the NEC to ensure that the land-management agencies participate in the status and trends activities in a coordinated approach.

The large number of regulatory functions of EPA and the few regulatory functions assigned to NOAA might be combined in an Environmental Regulatory Commission that would be independent, not part of NIER. A model for such an entity is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Research Focus on Protection, Restoration, and Management of Resources and Research Performance Characteristics

The focus on protection, restoration, and management of resources addresses a set of critically important and broad scientific, social, and economic issues concerning the environment. Such sites as wetlands and coastal borders must be protected or restored to ensure their role in providing life-support systems for economically and ecologically important resources. Remediating toxic-waste sites, nuclear facilities, and military sites might cost as much as $2 thousand billion. Public concern about exposure to toxic substances emphasizes the important role proposed for the institute in risk assessment, communication of results of risk assessment, and education. Addressing those issues requires the involvement of the full range of environmental disciplines, including the physical, biological, social, human health, and engineering sciences. Addressing resource-management issues will require

close attention to the integration of the natural, biological, engineering, and social sciences.

Specific Research Fields

Several fields of research warrant special attention. Among them is human-factors research. Because human behavior and institutions are major agents of environmental stress, the study of behavioral factors would be an integral function of the institute and would have to be organized along the general lines set forth in our recommended cultural changes. Also worthy of special note is environmental protection and restoration research, which includes research in waste remediation and other large-scale engineering issues and has received insufficient attention. Such engineering research holds the promise of large economic benefits. Estimates of costs to clean up contaminated environments with currently available technologies run into many billions of dollars. That highlights the value of research designed to reduce further pollution and the need for more efficient and less expensive methods to restore contaminated environments. Furthermore, few methods are available to restore degraded wetlands and grasslands to their former productive states.

National Environmental Council and National Environmental Plan

The NEC and NEP are critical for the successful operation of Framework C. NIER would play a central role in environmental research, but many subjects in the environmental sciences would not be within its domain, and coordination among the institute and other federal agencies would be essential. The NEP would recognize the role of the institute in the overall national and international framework, and the NEC would have a major role in influencing coordination efforts among NIER and other agencies involved in the overall NEP.

National Status and Trends Program and National Environmental Data and Information System

The creation of NIER would facilitate the integration of the National Status and Trends Program and the National Environmental Data and Information System (described in Chapter 4 and included among the essential

cultural changes required) as components of a complete program for environmental study and policy-setting. The institute is a natural home for both these entities.

The Environmental Assessment Center, performing the functions described previously, would be established as a separate entity.

FRAMEWORK D: A DEPARTMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENT

Framework D is a Department of the Environment. The department we recommend would include the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) but is not created by the elevation of EPA to cabinet status. Rather, the recommended department would have a character that derives from the research orientation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the strong and varied research and data-management programs of the other agencies to be included in the department. Furthermore, although the department would have a regulatory function, this activity would be clearly separated from the research and operational functions. The entity would be a fully functional department with research, regulatory, and operational arms and would have wide-ranging responsibilities in protection, restoration, and innovation for management of resources. It would be the focal point for initiating and performing international research projects and for developing U.S. positions for international agreements.

The department would have a research arm that incorporated the National Institute for Environmental Research (NIER) described in Framework C, a regulatory branch separate from NIER, and an operational part that would manage remediation and restoration activities for the nation and coordinate and facilitate a major program to promote innovation for management of natural resources. It would be responsible for identifying and setting priorities for protection and restoration needs, including waste sites, degraded habitats, and problems of global change ranging from greenhouse gas accumulation to biodiversity.

The research program would consist of a comprehensive approach to issues requiring integrated study of atmospheric, oceanographic, aquatic, and terrestrial processes and the expertise of physical, biological, and social

Figure 3 Framework D: A Department of the Environment.

scientists and engineers. Global change and biodiversity are both major concerns of the environmental disciplines in the physical, biological, and social sciences and engineering and could be the initial major interests of the research program of the department in the rubric of protection, restoration, and management of resources.

As in Framework C, special attention to human-factors research, biology, and engineering research is appropriate. The department, perhaps in association with the Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories, would be responsible for research and development in environmental engineering appropriate to the problems of protection, restoration, and research relevant to management of resources. The department would also be charged with forming linkages with industry.

With coordination overseen by the National Environmental Council (NEC) and as a major implementer of the National Environmental Plan (NEP), the Department of the Environmental would be the leader in such matters as support of training and facilities for environmental research and for public information and education.

As head of a cabinet-level department, the secretary would be in a position to influence national policy and to serve as a senior member of NEC coordinating activities.

Because the department would manage the research programs described for the National Institute for Environmental Research (NIER) in Framework C, it would include all the research of the agencies specified for inclusion in NIER: NOAA; the U.S. Geological Survey, (USGS); and environmental research parts of EPA and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration). Service functions of such agencies as the weather service of NOAA and research and mapping services of USGS would be included in the department.

All nonresearch activities of EPA would be incorporated into the department. The regulatory functions of EPA and NOAA would be a part of the department, and those responsible for regulatory decisions would be able to draw on the knowledge derived from the research, monitoring, and assessment activities of the department to inform their decisions. The regulatory branch, the Environmental Regulatory Commission (ERC), would advise the department about necessary research and improve its regulatory role, but the ERC would be administratively separated from the research functions of the department.

Although the department would have a large and important role in environmental matters, its focus on protection, restoration, and management of resources would not encompass all environmental issues. In particular, the full range of resources management as administered by the Department of the Interior (DOI) would not be part of the department's mission. It would be essential for the department to coordinate its activities with those of other agencies to ensure that the nation's environmental programs is complete. For example, the National Science Foundation (NSF) must expand its support of basic environmental science, and the mission-oriented agencies must perform research that serves their missions and increases general knowledge about the environment.

The department would need to maintain close liaison with many other departments and agencies, including DOE, the Department of Defense (DOD), DOI, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The linkages and coordination could be effected through the NEC, but could also benefit from a focus on protection and restoration in the Office of Science and Technology Policy's Federal Coordinating Council on Science, Engineering, and Technology. Protection and restoration responsibilities are now spread among a number of agencies, many of which are not proposed for inclusion in this department. EPA is responsible for a broad array of activities, especially in preventing and cleaning up pollution, and these functions would be integrated into the department.

Each of the resource-management agencies not proposed for incorporation into the department engages in protection and restoration activities, including research. These include the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, and DOD. The programs of those agencies need to be coordinated with the work of the Department of the Environment. Agencies with responsibility for resource management would maintain intramural programs of research and operations in protection and restoration for specific needs on the resources they managed. For example, DOD would continue to be responsible for cleanup of defense installations. Agencies with functions related to management of resources would continue to perform these functions but would coordinate their work with that of the Department of the Environment.

Agencies that engage in research on environmental engineering–such as DOE, NSF, and DOD–can increase the impact of their work by closer coordination of their efforts with those of this department, which already encompasses the engineering research of EPA.

Other agencies already have programs that contribute to our knowledge of how to enhance our ability to manage our natural resources. USDA has produced substantial improvements in agricultural productivity throughout its history and recently has been moving toward emphasis on long-term sustainable agricultural practice. DOI has focused on the management of public lands for economic production, e.g., grazing; the Tennessee Valley Authority, on regional economic development; the Bonneville Power Administration, on energy conservation and salmon rehabilitation; and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, on urban infrastructure, mass transportation, and other major public investments that represent environmentally responsible economic development. It is essential that those programs be coordinated with the work of the department.

Mechanisms must be put in place for the methods and technologies developed by federal programs (in association with the private sector) to be made available to industry; federal, state, and local agencies; and the general public. For example, techniques for habitat restoration will need to be made available to land-management agencies, such as the Forest Service and the National Park Service. Close cooperation must exist between research programs for the development of innovative approaches to managing natural resources and the industries that have common interests in this goal. Potential models exist in biomedicine (the National Institutes of Health technology-transfer program), agriculture (the USDA extension service), and technology (Sematech and the National Institute of Standards and Technology). Ideally, the model adopted would involve communication in both directions, providing information from users on issues in need of research and development.

The department would include the mission and functions described in Framework C for the National Institute for Environmental Research. Accordingly, it would have the same focus on protection, restoration, and management of resources and the same research performance characteristics as detailed in Chapter 4 and in the section of this chapter on cultural changes. We emphasize the need for a properly balanced program of support of intramural and extramural research that will guarantee a close association of the department with universities and other research performers.

The NEC would ensure coordination of research programs between the Department of the Environment and other agencies.

The department, as a focal point for environmental programs, could serve as the developer of the NEP.

National Environmental Status and Trends Program and National Environmental Data and Information System

The National Environmental Data and Information System and the National Environmental Status and Trends Program described in Chapter 4 would be housed in the department. Most of the agencies now involved in gathering and managing environmental information would be incorporated into the department, and their location in one department might facilitate the missions of preparing status and trends reports and providing for an information and data network that enhances research, regulation, resource management, and policy formation. A national biological survey could be a major interest for the department and might be a cooperative effort between the department and the agencies, proposed for inclusion, such as USGS, and agencies not proposed for inclusion, such as DOI.

The Environmental Assessment Center described earlier would not be part of the department. Rather, it would be so situated as to be able to draw on the information resources of the department and other agencies, such as those involved with human-health aspects of the environmental sciences, so that assessments and policy formation could take into account all information from the various centers of environmental science, regulation, and management. Effective assessments and policy formation can be performed only when they consider human-health, economic, and behavioral aspects of the focal issue with the natural-science and engineering aspects.

DISCUSSION OF THE FRAMEWORKS FOR ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

Because all the frameworks described above call for the implementation of the cultural changes recommended by the committee, we believe that any of them would improve environmental research and decision-making in the federal government. All frameworks would improve the use of existing research capabilities and would provide a focus for a national research effort on protection, restoration, and management of resources. The more ambitious and comprehensive alternatives entail substantial institutional and budgetary costs and are likely to encounter fiscal limitations, desires by interest groups and Congress to maintain jurisdictional authority and patterns of influence, and other barriers to adoption. The committee is also mindful of the hazards and transitional costs of government reorganizations–confusion, costs of changeover that will undercut government-agency effectiveness for some time, risks that long-term monitoring and other unfinished business will be lost, and strife within organizations as responsibilities are reapportioned and established organizational cultures are disrupted. If the more thorough rearrangements are judged to be worthy of investment–as the committee believes–Congress and the executive branch must provide clear mandates, adequate budgets, and political leadership, not only at the outset but for at least a decade.

CURRENT AGENCY STRUCTURE WITH ENHANCEMENTS (FRAMEWORK A)

Continuation of the current structure for managing the nation's environmental research program, with enhancements (creation of new offices and functions) that provide for the implementation of the cultural changes recommended by the committee, addresses some of the needs for a strong program in environmental protection, restoration, and management of resources. This framework is the least expensive to implement, would minimize disruption of existing agencies, and would create minimal political tension. It would also maintain the current diverse and pluralistic base of support for environmental research. For those practical reasons, the committee considers Framework A to be one of its primary recommendations for implementation.

The national environmental research program would be coordinated by the National Environmental Council (NEC), which would oversee the development of the National Environmental Plan and coordinate the research program of the agencies and a program shared by the federal agencies for assessing our natural resources through the status and trends program.

Environmental data and information would be managed more efficiently in the National Environmental Data and Information System (NEDIS). Connections between environmental research and policy would be made by enhanced mechanisms within each agency and by the establishment of the Environmental Assessment Center.

The success of this approach would depend completely on good-faith participation by the agencies and the effectiveness of the NEC in coordinating the activities of a large number of individual agencies. The council could create cross-cut budgets, following the model used by the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Global Change Research Program. This process could be effective for selected, high-profile programs but might not suffice as a general mechanism for obtaining coordinated support for a wide variety of large and small research projects.

Expanded linkages with the business sector and enhanced education and training programs would remain the responsibility of individual agencies. The only provision for developing a comprehensive program of environmental protection, restoration, and management of resources would be the coordinating effort of the NEC, which could make recommendations to the agencies to focus their efforts on these research directions.

Among the existing agencies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) are the most likely candidates under Framework A to serve as the home of the new Environmental Status and Trends Program and the NEDIS–two parts of the cultural changes recommended by the committee. Again, it would be the responsibility of the NEC to determine whether the lead for these two programs would be assigned to an individual agency or be a distributed responsibility among the agencies that is coordinated by the NEC. The figure representing the organizational arrangements for Framework A shows the two programs as free-standing to imply that they would not be assigned to a single agency, but would be operated by all the agencies under the coordination of the NEC.

Unless the NEC guides the program with a firm hand, it would be difficult under Framework A to implement the cultural changes related to improvements in how environmental research is performed and supported by the agencies, for example, encouraging each agency to support graduate training or to increase the amount of money awarded in extramural grants.

NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT (FRAMEWORK B)

The committee accepted that its central charge required a thorough analysis of federal environmental research from first principles. We began with that task, and only when we had a firm grasp on the current status of environmental research and the necessary elements of an environmental research program and had developed a series of hypothetical frameworks of our own did we include the National Institute for the Environment in the context of our broad review. Because the Committee for the National Institute for the Environment (CNIE) was going through a similar learning experience, testing its initial proposal against new ideas in an evolving political climate, the NIE proposal has changed greatly from the one that was presented to use at the beginning of our work. It is interesting to see the extent to which our Committee and the CNIE have converged on common themes.

We are favorably impressed with many aspects of the NIE proposal as it appeared at the end of 1992. The plan is a credible and effective view of a means to organize environmental research. It would enhance the nation's capability to perform environmental research and increase knowledge that will contribute to the solution of environmental problems. In particular, the NIE's recasting of its original five research institutes, which seemed arbitrary and overlapping to many, into three broadly functional questions–''What do we have? How does it work? How can we maintain it?"–is straightforward and focused. The NIE research components fit our proposed research directions: comprehension of the components of the environment, deepening of our understanding of transfers of energy and materials, and advancement of social goals of protecting and restoring the environment.

We agree with the CNIE that it is often wise to isolate the research process, especially the long-term exploratory research phase, from regulatory and management decisions, but we believe that specific research to solve immediate regulatory and management problems also has a place. NIE could focus needed attention on research that bridges the gap between the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) style of investigator-initiated fundamental research and other federal agency research directed at specific regulatory and management problems.

The NIE proposal attempts to structure environmental research in a way that will incorporate the skills of all pertinent disciplines and sectors: business, academe, nongovernment organizations, the states, and the federal government. Its emphasis on quality through the merit-review process is to be commended. Perhaps NIE's greatest service would be its focusing of the nation's environmental effort to capture the talents of nonfederal researchers by providing

incentives for them to perform policy-relevant environmental research. That would be done through a significant extramural, multidisciplinary funding program for research on subjects selected by an advisory committee consisting of persons of diverse interests drawn from a variety of communities.

The NIE proposal is predicated on the view that the niche to be filled in federal programs for environmental research is extramural research. The CNIE believes that it would be less difficult to have a new NIE that focused on merit-reviewed extramural research, policy assessment, and information management than to rearrange the existing mission-oriented agencies and change their cultures for these tasks, especially because their own tasks must continue to be addressed.

NIE is proposed as a new agency that does not encompass or replace existing ones. The committee believes that NIE, if not carefully monitored, could duplicate the roles and missions of existing agencies and engender "turf battles" as it competed for funds and programs with existing agencies. For example, NIE's first aim, basic understanding of the components of the environment, might overlap with the Department of the Interior's planned National Biological Survey and EPA's Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program, unless the roles of extramural and intramural research were understood. The differences between exploratory research versus management research, regulatory research, and monitoring would have to be explored and carefully delineated. To be successful, NIE would have to be seen as a resource for EPA, DOI, and others.

Although a strength of the NIE research-management plan is its attempt to bring many constituencies into research-planning and priority-setting through its advisory process, how this will work in practice within a federal agency is not clear. The various constituencies will have very different agendas. However, the NSF model of the National Science Board for priority-setting suggests that success could be achieved.

The committee believes that the proposed NIE would improve the nation's environmental research effort but does not go far enough to solve all the problems in environmental research that we have identified.

NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH (FRAMEWORK C)

The National Institute for Environmental Research (NIER) that we have described establishes an identifiable central focus for the organization of the nation's environmental research. Its mission would be to conduct a comprehensive environmental research program on protection, restoration, and

management of resources, thus addressing critical national needs. Such a program would encompass most aspects of global change (stratospheric ozone depletion, loss of biological diversity, and atmospheric carbon dioxide accumulation), toxic-site cleanup, risk assessment, wetland preservation, and other problems at the forefront of public concern.

NIER would administer the Environmental Status and Trends Program and the National Environmental Data and Information System. As an organization directed specifically toward environmental research, the institute would have the identity and coherence to strengthen links with the private sector, universities, and research institutes. Peer-reviewed science programs would infuse environmental research with creativity and lead to a better science product. The institute would also develop education and training programs to increase the human resources necessary for addressing environmental problems. The research mission of the institute and the products of the research program are directly related to many important policy decisions. Thus, the institute would provide valuable information for setting national environmental policies.

To accomplish its mission, NIER would be composed of EPA (except its regulatory parts), the research components of NOAA, the parts of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that are directed toward environmental research (Earth Observing Satellite/Mission to Planet Earth), and USGS. By providing a single organization, the institute would bring coherence and coordination to a substantial portion of the nation's environmental research program. However, forming the institute would require changes in the current structure of four federal agencies and would separate parts of NOAA and NASA. These changes would create political tension and administrative and implementation costs. As an independent agency, NIER would have the flexibility to set its own priorities within its Congressional mandate. Nevertheless, the institute would be headed by a director, who would have to negotiate with department secretaries in establishing the National Environmental Plan (NEP) and in arguing for funding and assigned responsibilities. The mission of the institute omits important environmental interests, such as land management and environmental regulation. The institute would not include important elements of environmental research related to biological diversity, land management, and global change. Most notable is the absence of programs and offices drawn from DOI, including the Fish and Wildlife Service. The success of the institute in improving federal research and policy would rest to a large extent on the effectiveness of the NEC and its ability to coordinate the activities of the institute with those of other agencies.

Because the institute suggested in this framework is focused on research, it would be necessary to separate the research and service functions of agencies from which a research part is moved. For example, NOAA research might be separated from NOAA weather and climate prediction or NASA's Mission to Planet Earth research from other NASA environmental research. The committee believes that such separations are inadvisable and counterproductive.

The committee believes that NIER would improve the nation's environmental research effort but does not go far enough to solve all the problems in environmental research that we have identified.

DEPARTMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENT (FRAMEWORK D)

The Department of the Environment would include the mission and responsibilities of the National Institute for Environmental Research but also include explicit regulatory functions organized in the Environmental Regulatory Commission. As an administrative unit with research and regulatory responsibilities, the department would provide leadership in the nation's programs for protection, restoration, and management of resources. With its extensive responsibilities, the department would operate at the cabinet level and be headed by a secretary. Environmental issues would thus be elevated to the same level as other national issues.

Forming the Department of the Environment would involve transferring the research and regulatory responsibilities of EPA and NOAA and their research programs. Although the department would have responsibilities for research and regulation, there would be clear administrative separation of regulation and research. Nevertheless, this combined arrangement in one agency is designed to ensure that the nation has a strong environmental research program to support its regulatory decisions and policies.

The Department of the Environment would easily accommodate most of the cultural changes recommended in this report. With the NEC, the department could lead in the setting and implementation of a national research agenda through the NEP. Because most environmental research would be the responsibility of the department, there would be better coordination among many pieces that are now distributed among different agencies. The mission agencies would continue to support their own environmental research programs, such as natural-resource management. These programs would be coordinated with the Department of the Environment through the NEC. The department's coherent environmental research program would assist in

ensuring that there are no inadvertent omissions in the nation's research program and would serve as a focal point for expanded linkages with the private sector, academic institutions, and other research performers and clients. The department, with its comprehensive program in research and regulation, would provide a strong infrastructure for environmental research and serve as a catalyst for education and training and for communication with the public about environmental issues and the federal programs related to those issues.

Having departmental status, the Department of the Environment would play a strong role in formulating national policy on all relevant topics. The department would not include land-management research programs, but, given its cabinet status, its research programs would contribute to the effectiveness of other departments as they participate in a program coordinated by the NEC. Moreover, the department would coordinate the nation's activities in international programs.

Although there would be political tension because of the changes in the organization of federal environmental research, the tension might be mitigated because departmental status would elevate the current administrative level of these programs. Similarly, although costs would be associated with the reorganization, these would be repaid by the increase in efficiency, by the reduction in unnecessary duplication of environmental research programs, and potentially by the savings that could result from solving environmental problems. These problems would require enormous amounts to remedy if research were not successful in ameliorating the cost.

The committee cautions, however, that simply elevating EPA to cabinet status without redefining its research responsibilities could be counterproductive. Regulatory agencies have often encountered difficulty in carrying out long-term research (NRC, 1985; EPA, 1992a). If environmental research is to meet the requirements identified in this report, it is crucial that any new cabinet-level agency be designed to take the cultural changes called for into account so that the necessary reorganization improves the quality of research.

ELEVATING THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY TO CABINET STATUS

As this report is being completed, Congress is considering legislation to elevate the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to cabinet rank. We believe that the creation of a Department of the Environment is an appropriate and long-overdue move, but we believe that, at least from the

standpoint of environmental research, more should be done than simply elevating EPA to cabinet level. If EPA is elevated, its research mission and organization must be redefined.

The difficulties with EPA's research program administered by its Office of Research and Development are well analyzed in EPA's own report Safeguarding the Future: Credible Science, Credible Decisions (EPA, 1992a). We concur with the general thrust of the report, and we applaud the agency's moves to implement its recommendations. But serious structural and programmatic difficulties remain.

EPA's mission is regulation, largely to protect human health. This is a large and important mission, and EPA's research, for the most part, is necessarily directed to support of the regulatory function. As a result, there is never adequate time or money to undertake the long-range, multidisciplinary research on fundamental environmental problems and processes that we think is essential to secure our future.

EPA's regulations are often, or usually, responses to perceived emergencies, such as the Love Canal toxic-waste problem in New York state or the Times Beach, Missouri, dioxin problem. In such emergencies, there is usually an inadequate research base for reliable policy-setting and all the agency's resources are consumed to provide even a minimal level of scientific understanding. Even when further research illuminates a problem, legislation and regulations are often so narrowly drawn that it is difficult to modify the law or the rule, and that undermines the usefulness of research and scientific information. Finally, given the seriousness of environmental hazards, policy-setters must act in "better safe than sorry" ways, producing policy so rigidly established that it is difficult to sponsor further research that might change the scientific base.

For all those reasons, we believe it essential to separate the fundamental research on environmental processes and problems from the short-term, regulation-focused research that EPA necessarily pursues. We doubt that that is possible within the existing EPA structure. Without such separation, we believe it unlikely that EPA can recruit adequate numbers of the best-qualified scientists to pursue the high-quality, peer-reviewed, science that must have high priority at EPA.

In the Department of the Environment we have described in Framework D, we have provided for a fundamental research organization dedicated to performance, and support, of basic research and other features of a successful environmental research program we believe must be added. We have laid these out in what we have called "cultural" changes. They include creation of a high-level leadership body (we suggest at the vice presidential level), including the heads of the federal agencies charged with environmental

responsibility, to set the agenda for the environmental research program. They also include development of a National Environmental Plan, whose research component is our concern here. Most important, the cultural changes include different ways of thinking about environmental research– ways that have not been part of EPA's culture and that we believe EPA cannot incorporate if it is simply elevated to departmental status. In our Framework D, we incorporate the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Geological Survey, and parts of other agencies with research cultures that would be different from those of EPA.

We see establishment of a broadly based, continuing monitoring program as essential. Although EPA has undertaken this task in its Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program, we believe a more comprehensive effort is needed.

We think it unlikely that these cultural changes in our environmental research effort can be accomplished by simply raising EPA to cabinet level unless the implementation of the essential cultural changes can be ensured. A broader, more comprehensive organization that included other parts of the federal environmental research enterprise, such as that suggested in our Framework D, would be more likely to get the job done. The EPA functions would be included, but other important functions should also be included, both within the department and as separate bodies.

The elevation of EPA to cabinet level and the efforts of the Department of the Interior to play a greater role in research on the environment (as evidenced by Secretary Babbitt's initiative for a National Biological Survey) can be steps forward. If the cultural changes that we suggest in this report are integrated into the plans and actions of the Department of the Environment (created by elevation of EPA) and the Department of the Interior, we believe the nation's environmental research program will be enhanced vastly.

Our recommendations can be fully evaluated only if one considers what the costs of the different features and the different frameworks might be. The basic importance of our report, however, is not about money, much as we believe that more money is desirable. It is about raising environmental research to new levels of organizational structure and providing it with goals intended to address some large problems of national security more effectively. We believe that if these objectives are achieved, the money issues, in the long run, will sort themselves out.

There is no way to obtain a reliable estimate of the cost of adopting all our recommendations, but we can draw some general conclusions.

Obviously, a move as large as the creation of the new department of Framework D would be expensive, but it is impossible to make even a precise estimate of how expensive. The department would embrace a number of existing agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and their present budgets can be incorporated in the budget of the new operation. Furthermore, there is duplication in the present decentralized mission-agency organization, and elimination of that duplication could save money. But new functions would add costs.

How much the new department would cost in the beginning would depend on how ambitious it would be. When the National Science Foundation (NSF) began its life in 1950, its budget was hardly noticeable. It grew slowly as NSF's mission was defined and its opportunities developed. Even the most important operations can begin gradually. Starting a new Department of the Environment slowly and with care seems to be in order–restructuring existing functions, making the recommended cultural changes, and eliminating as much duplication as possible.

To get an idea of necessary added costs, we can examine Framework A, which keeps existing mission agencies and adds several functions, including the National Environmental Council (NEC), the Environmental Assessment Center, the National Environmental Status and Trends Program, and the National Environmental Data and Information System. The NEC is an important innovation, and could be created at little dollar cost–only that for a relatively small staff. Large pieces of the National Environmental Data and Information System already exist, and a skeletal coordinated operation could be put into place at relatively small cost. As means were developed not only to collect data and information in a coherent and consistent way, but also to make them readily available with the latest and most effective technology, the cost would become larger.

The National Environmental Status and Trends Program, in the beginning, could be put together with monitoring programs already in place in EPA, USGS, and other agencies. As the gaps were identified and filled, the costs would begin to accumulate.

The Environmental Assessment Center would add a function not available for incorporation from existing agencies to any great degree. It would build from the ground up for the most part but would start relatively small and feel its way.

One can get a rough idea of what a specified amount of money might buy by comparison with existing programs. If one were to add 10% of the

budgets for existing federal environmental research programs, one would be adding about $500 million a year–about what EPA's annual research costs are. That is a great deal of new research.

If reorganization of the federal environmental research programs were undertaken with the aim of achieving as many of the desirable goals as possible, through either Framework A or Framework D recommendations, and eliminating as much duplication as possible, and if there were a commitment to begin by adding 10% of the present research budget, it could be achieved. If the objectives were more ambitious, through expansion of the NSF budget to cover fields of research not now covered (for example, through rapid expansion of the monitoring program or through markedly expanded international cooperation), the increased budgets would be much larger.

We believe that there are compelling reasons for spending more money on environmental research than is now being spent. Almost any amount of money–from the 10% increase suggested above to the tripling of the federal investment in environmental research suggested by the National Commission on the Environment–could be wisely invested, provided that the recommended cultural and organizational changes were adopted.

In thinking about costs, one must keep in mind the costs of doing nothing. Many environmental matters have been driven into the courts when scientific uncertainty has made it difficult to establish agreed-on standards of environmental quality and methods of attaining them. Use of the courts will always be part of the problem-solving machinery, but the costs of litigation are large.

Estimates of the cost of present and future efforts to protect and restore the environment are staggering. We have heard $50 billion quoted as the cost of cleaning up the Hanford nuclear site alone. We have a total backlog of toxic-waste remediation that might cost as much as $2 thousand billion (William Reilly, EPA, Congressional testimony, March 1992). We have no adequate technology for that waste cleanup, and we will not have it until we invest in much more research to learn how to do it effectively. Who can estimate the cost to the nation occasioned by loss of biological diversity and extinction of species, if that threat proves as great as biologists predict?

Our national security is at issue. Ensuring that security by spending money to understand the problems that we now see only dimly must have a very high priority.

This book assesses the strengths and weaknesses of current environmental research programs, describes the desirable characteristics of an effective program, and recommends cultural and organizational changes to improve the performance of environmental research. Research areas in need of greater emphasis are identified, and overall directions for environmental research are recommended. The book also comments on the proposal to establish a National Institute for the Environment and on the elevation of the Environmental Protection Agency to cabinet status.

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Environmental Sciences Ph.D. (EVS) Research Plan

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The Environmental Sciences Ph.D. Program is a research-based degree program requiring a written and orally defended research dissertation. Since research is a primary component of this program, the Graduate Advisory Committee must approve the student's Research Plan.

• The Research Plan is not meant to be in the form of a formal research proposal. There is a separate course (required for Chemistry Concentration students) that teaches students how to prepare a formal research proposal.
• The Research Plan should be viewed like a contract between the student, the student's mentor, and the student's Graduate Advisory Committee. Changes to the Research Plan may occur while the research is carried out over the course of the student's tenure. The Graduate Advisory committee should be made aware of any substantial changes should this need arise.

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• The experimental procedures and methods should contain sufficient detail in order for the Graduate Advisory Committee to evaluate the proposal and judge its probability of success. Equipment and supplies necessary for this research should be adequately described.
• The Research Plan should include a bibliography; any other pertinent information may be included in the Research Plan.

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• If changes are suggested at the time of the Research Plan Defense, then the corrected copy is the one that should be forwarded to the Directors office, along with the Research Plan Cover Sheet and any pertinent forms.
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BOEM must comply with numerous environmental statutes, regulations, and executive orders to carry out its mission. BOEM is dedicated to acquiring and using the highest quality scientific information in support of Bureau decisions. To that end, the Environmental Studies Program (ESP) employs a rigorous planning, review, and procurement process to meet the nation's environmental research needs for Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) resource assessments.

ESP staff from Headquarters and Regional program offices prepare the annual Studies Development Plan (SDP) to cover a two-year planning period. The plan includes brief study descriptions or profiles that describe proposed studies for the upcoming fiscal year and for one successive year. Proposed studies are evaluated for program relevance, programmatic timeliness, and scientific merit.

BOEM has formulated its Fiscal Year 2025-2026 Studies Development Plan covering all BOEM energy and minerals activities. It includes studies proposed for Alaska, Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Pacific OCS areas.

Additionally, BOEM consults with the  Committee on Offshore Science and Assessment  as a source of independent, scientifically credible, and objective information on topics of interest for the environmental studies and assessment activities and to support discussions on relevant issues. Collectively, these inputs contribute to the development of research plans.

BOEM maintains a complete description of ongoing BOEM studies by region. Each listing describes the research being conducted, the scientific discipline, the institution performing the work, the cost of the effort, timeframe, and any associated publications, presentations, or affiliated web sites.

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While the SDP serves a primarily internal planning function, it is a publicly available document and is used to communicate the proposed studies both internally within BOEM and externally with potential partners and other interested parties. The SDP and resulting studies undergo peer review at several stages to ensure the quality of the work proposed. When completed, the annual SDP forms the basis for the National Studies List (NSL), which represents the proposed studies for a given fiscal year, subject to the availability of funds.

To formulate the NSL, each region and program develops a priority order for their studies proposed. These lists are evaluated again by Headquarters, principally considering program relevance, timing, and budgetary constraints. Discussions are conducted with each of the regional/program offices, and when consensus is achieved, the NSL is recommended for approval. Once the annual appropriations for the Department have been approved, studies on the NSL are procured via competitive procurements, cooperative agreements with a State institution or university, or through inter/intra agency agreements with other Federal agencies. BOEM highly values studies procured through the National Oceanographic Partnership Program ( NOPP ) with other governmental, industry, academic, tribal, non-governmental, and foundation partners. This allows all the parties to leverage financial, human, maritime, and other technological assets to meet mission objectives. BOEM's ESP seeks innovative approaches and technologies to help us advance the science program.

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Open Calls for Proposals

UNEP is seeking partners committed to environmental sustainability. Below is a list of all current open calls for proposal relating to UNEP project and activities. Potential partners are invited to review the requirements related to calls for proposal which they are interested in by following the links provided and submit applications in accordance with the instructions given in the call for proposal.

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Title : Call for Proposals - Systemic Drivers of Food Loss and Waste in the United States

Title : call for proposals - addressing unique drivers of united states household food waste, title : call for wwqa workstream proposals and seed funding applications 2022/2023, title : fourth call for application - global ecosystem-based adaptation fund, title : structuring and regulation of the climate change fund of the republic of paraguay, title : call for applications: adaptation fund climate innovation accelerator – unep-ctcn.

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55 Remarkable Environmental Topics for Research Proposal

Explore the collection of great environmental research topics from field experts.

Environmental Research Topics: Features, Importance & Great Ideas

Environmental investigations entail investigating the natural world’s structure and function, the association between humans and the environment, and how people’s values, beliefs, and attitudes affect that association. Environmental research topics thus cover a wide range of subjects, including climate change, biodiversity, pollution, renewable energy, and sustainability.

How to Choose Environmental Topics for Research

Environmental investigations is a very broad field that offers a wide range of areas to investigate. So how can you choose a good one for your paper? First, always pick an issue from the area you are interested in. What is environmental science direction you’d like to develop? Working on your paper will be easier since you’ll be motivated to explore something you care about. From there, sort through your environmental topics for research to determine the following:

• Relevance – does the proposal theme address an environmental issue with significant societal implications, such as pollution or climate change?
• Originality –  does the investigation subject offer a new perspective on existing knowledge?
• Feasibility – are the environmental topics to research realistic and achievable based on the scope and your available resources?
• Scope – how broad is the matter of investigation? It shouldn’t be too broad or too narrow; it should be the right size to provide a comprehensive investigation.

When choosing environmental science research paper topics, avoid those that are too complex or require more resources and time than you can provide. Remember also to consider data availability, literature, funding, time, and ethical issues involved.

Environmental Topics for Research Paper Are Not Created Equal

Environmental science topics are created differently depending on your discipline, purpose, scope, and methodology. Thus, the approach used to formulate them differs as they will serve different purposes. For example, some are explanatory and will try to explain how something happens or works. Others will try to seek more knowledge about a subject(exploratory). Then, you might also encounter a few that compare and contrast two phenomena or situations.

When assessing investigation issues, carefully evaluate your goals and interests before committing to a specific one. Otherwise, you might get stuck. Luckily our research proposal writing services are always here to help you help to get out of even the most challenging situation!

The Most Actual Environmental Science Topics for an Excellent Proposal

Natural and human-made systems that shape our planet and affect its inhabitants are one of the most interesting areas to write a paper about. Check out these environmental topics for research paper to produce an engaging proposal.

1. Consequences of Climate Change Human Societies.

2. Challenges of Renewable Energy Technologies.

3. Recycling Initiatives and Their Implications on Reducing Pollution.

4. Challenges of Sustainable Management of Freshwater Resources.

5. The Impact of Low Air Quality on Human Health.

6. Effectiveness of Conservational Policies in Addressing Environmental Issues.

7. Impacts of Sustainable Transportation in Reducing Urban Ecological Footprint.

8. Effect of Marine Pollution on Marine Ecosystems.

9. Challenges Facing Sustainable Farming Practices.

10. Impacts of Electricity Generation on the Environment.

11. Ecological Hazards of Electronic Waste.

12. Tourism’s Negative Effect on Ecosystems.

Environmental science research topics are often flexible and can be broadened or narrowed down depending on the scope of your study.

Interesting Environmental Justice Topics

Environmental justice involves advocating for fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people in implementing environmental laws and policies. Here’re exciting environmental justice topics for a good proposal.

1. Effect of Hazardous Waste Facilities on Minority Communities.

2. The Influence of Air Pollution Exposure on the Health of Marginalized Populations.

3. Effect of Unequal Distribution of Parks and Green Spaces in Disadvantaged Neighborhoods.

4. Relationship Between Indigenous Communities and Conservation Efforts.

5. Influence of Climate Change on Vulnerable Communities.

6. Differential Impacts of Natural Disasters on Marginalized Populations.

7. The Importance of Environmental Education in Empowering Disadvantaged Communities.

8. Barriers to Equitable Access to Healthy and Sustainable Food Options in Marginalized Communities.

9. Geographical Inequalities in Accessing Clean Water.

10. The Intersection Between Food Justice and Ecological Concerns.

11. The Link Between Exposure to Pollutants Hazards and Adverse Health Outcomes in Socially Disadvantaged Groups.

12. Barriers to Equitable Distribution of Resources and Assistance During Post-disaster Recovery in Marginalized Communities.

The above can provide great options for a research proposal about environmental problems and how they affect specific populations.

Insightful Environmental Economics Research Topics

Environmental economics research topics aim to understand the human activities impacting on the natural environment and human welfare. So if you are looking for decent quantitative research ideas , consider the following offered by our experienced investigator.

1. Effectiveness of Economic Incentives in Promoting the Adoption of Renewable Energy Sources.

2. Effect of Pollution Regulations on Automobile Manufacturing Industry Competitiveness.

3. Factors Promoting Economic Growth in Green Industries and Sustainable Sectors.

4. The Economic Influence of Urban Sprawl on Environmental Quality.

5. Economic Implications of Water Scarcity.

6. Economic Incentives for Conserving Biodiversity.

7. Economic Benefits of Investing in Renewable Energy Technologies.

8. The Economic Viability of Strategies to Reduce Plastic Pollution.

9. Effectiveness of Carbon Pricing Mechanisms in Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions.

10. Economic Consequences of Natural Disasters.

11. Economic Importance of Disaster Preparedness and Resilience.

12. Economic Benefits of Transitioning From a Linear to a Circular Economy Model Focused on Resource Efficiency and Waste Reduction.

13. Role of Green Finance & Sustainable Investments in Supporting Eco-Friendly Projects and Businesses.

14. Efficient Water Pricing Mechanisms to Encourage Conservation.

Captivating Environmental Biology Research Topics

Environmental biology research topics will often try to assess the interaction between living organisms and their natural or human-modified environments. Check out these interesting issues to investigate for your biology research proposal .

1. Ways in Which Climate Change Affects the Distribution and Habitat Suitability of Plants.

2. Relationship Between Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health.

3. Role of Keystone Species in Maintaining Ecosystem Processes.

4. Human Factors Contributing to the Decline of Endangered Species.

5. Ecological Effect of Invasive Species on Local Ecosystems.

6. Factors Contributing to Pollinator Decline.

7. Ecological Consequences for Plant-Pollinator Interactions and Food Security.

8. Ecological Effects of Microplastics in Freshwater and Marine Ecosystems.

9. Shifts in the Timing of Seasonal Events in Animals in Response to Climate Change.

10. Ways in Which Changes in Land Use Impact Biodiversity.

11. Ways in Which Deforestation Impacts Ecological Communities.

12. Effects of Agricultural Pollutants on Ecosystems.

13. Challenges of Ecotoxicological Risk Assessments.

14. Ways in Which Wildlife Populations Adapt to Urban Environments.

15. Effects of Conservation on Human-Wildlife Interactions.

16. The Impact of Rising Carbon Dioxide Levels on Coral Reef Ecosystems.

17. The Influence of Marine Tourism on Marine Biodiversity.

DOWNLOAD Here More Environmental Research Proposal Ideas!

Importance of choosing the right environmental research paper topics.

Choosing the proper investigation issue is crucial for the success and impact of your paper. Topics related to environment issues tend to be complicated and demand a thorough understanding of the natural and social dimensions of the problem. But with the right choice, the writing process is much easier and gives a better chance to produce a quality paper.

Poor environmental research paper topics will waste your time, resources and even cause frustration when investigators struggle to meet the word count. So, choose your subjects of investigation wisely or request expert help if you need extra support.

While the above topics for environmental research papers might prove useful, sometimes picking a subject of investigation and working on a proposal can be daunting. But you shouldn’t worry. We have a large team of experienced writers ready to work on your paper and final paper. You only need to send your instructions, and they’ll embark on the task.

We’re here to help with your proposal. So drop us a line anytime you may need professional assistance!

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Final Draft National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences FY2025-FY2029 Strategic Plan

A Notice by the National Institutes of Health on 06/28/2024

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National Institutes of Health, HHS.

Request for comments.

The goal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) strategic planning process is to set scientific areas of emphasis and priority approaches to anticipate and meet areas of opportunity for furthering environmental health sciences research, training, and translation. NIEHS makes available the final draft of the FY2025-FY2029 NIEHS Strategic Plan.

Comments must be received by 11:59:59 p.m. (ET) on July 21, 2024, to ensure consideration.

Comments should be submitted by email to [email protected] .

Dr. Nicole J. Garbarini, Office of Scientific Coordination, Planning, and Evaluation, email: [email protected] or call non-toll-free number 301-435-4642.

This Federal Register notice is in accordance with the 21st Century Cures Act, requiring NIH and its Institutes and Centers to regularly update their strategic plans. NIEHS is one of the 27 institutes and centers that makes up the National Institute of Health, and conducts and supports research on factors in the environment that affect human health.

The mission of the NIEHS is to discover how the environment affects people, in order to promote healthier lives. The vision of the NIEHS is to provide global leadership for innovative research that improves public health by preventing disease and disability. NIEHS research covers all organ systems, diseases, and conditions that could be caused or affected by environmental impacts, which are defined broadly. The NIEHS achieves its mission and vision through multidisciplinary biomedical research programs, as well as prevention and intervention efforts. NIEHS research is disseminated to inform evidence-based environmental health policies to prevent disease and protect health. The NIEHS also focuses on communication and research translation strategies that encompass training, education, technology transfer, and community engagement.

During January 31-April 20, 2023, NIEHS solicited input to its strategic planning process through public comments on its 2018-2023 Strategic Plan and its associated goals, as well as any other aspect of environmental health sciences. Approximately 169 unique responses, both individual and group, were received in response to this RFI. In April 2023, NIEHS hosted a virtual community workshop including more than 100 invited participants from across diverse sectors to provide input Start Printed Page 54014 through presentation and discussion of their ideas for priorities of the strategic plan. Reports and recommendations on key topics were generated as output of this workshop. Comment on strategic priorities in environmental health sciences was also solicited through discussion with the the National Advisory Environmental Health Sciences Council and the Board of Scientific Counselors. . Following compilation, curation, and analysis of all input, results of this curation were presented to NIEHS Senior Leadership to inform discussions and development of the plan, including Research Areas of Emphasis. and, and priority approaches for achieving the plan's translational goals.The NIEHS seeks comments from all interested parties on its final draft “FY2025-FY2028 NIEHS Strategic Plan: Health at the Intersection of People and Their Environments.”

The final draft plan may be viewed online at https://www.niehs.nih.gov/​about/​strategicplan/​finaldraft .

Dated: June 20, 2024.

Richard P. Woychik,

Director, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and National Toxicology Program.

[ FR Doc. 2024-14241 Filed 6-27-24; 8:45 am]

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Companies setting climate transition plans up 44% in 2023, research shows

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Simon leads a team tracking how the financial system and companies more broadly are responding to the challenges posed by climate change, nature loss and other environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues including diversity and inclusion.

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Striving to be the first climate-neutral continent

Climate change and environmental degradation are an existential threat to Europe and the world. To overcome these challenges, the European Green Deal will transform the EU into a modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy, ensuring:

• no net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050
• economic growth decoupled from resource use
• no person and no place left behind

The European Green Deal is also our lifeline out of the COVID-19 pandemic. One third of the €1.8 trillion  investments from the NextGenerationEU Recovery Plan, and the EU’s seven-year budget will finance the European Green Deal.

The European Commission has adopted a set of proposals to make the EU's climate, energy, transport and taxation  policies fit for reducing net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030 , compared to 1990 levels. More information on  Delivering the European Green Deal .

Discover the European Green Deal visual story

12 March 2024 - The Commission has published a Communication on managing climate risks in Europe that sets out how the EU and its countries can implement policies that save lives, cut costs, and protect prosperity. It comes as a direct response to the first-ever European Climate Risk Assessment by the European Environment Agency. It also addresses the concerns that many Europeans have following last’s year record temperatures and extreme weather events. The Commission is calling for action from all levels of government, the private sector and civil society to improve governance and tools for climate risk owners, manage risks across sectors and set the right preconditions to finance climate resilience.

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We Read 6,795 Pages of State Climate Plans. Here’s a First Look at What We Found.

Photo illustration by Amanda Pontillo, Climate XChange. US map by Rumi/Adobe Stock and infographic by the8monkey/Adobe Stock.

Molly Freed and Wendy Jaglom-Kurtz, RMI Rachel Patterson and Medhini Kumar, Evergreen Collaborative Ruby Wincele and Paola Ferreira Miani, Climate XChange

Note: This article was edited on May 30, 2024 with updated figures for the number of measures included in states’ Priority Climate Action Plans.

View our spreadsheet containing key data and information from the 47 Priority Climate Action Plans submitted to the EPA as part of the Climate Pollution Reduction Grants program.

Almost every state has stood up to take action on the latest IRA opportunity. Here are the numbers documenting their climate ambition.

Millions of dollars are about to flow to states to help them tackle their unique local climate challenges. The Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) program is one of the largest buckets of direct funding within the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), providing $5 billion to states, municipalities, Tribes, and other governments to reduce climate pollution. The first phase of the program, the planning grants, put $250 million in state and local governments’ hands to conceive of their clean energy future. And nearly every US state, along with D.C. and Puerto Rico, put their hand up for this tremendous opportunity by submitting a Priority Climate Action Plan (Climate Plan) to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just last month.

It is a signal that a vast majority of US states — even ones that haven’t historically been leaders on climate — are eager to capitalize on the opportunity to address climate, advance clean energy, lower energy costs, clean up air pollution, and create jobs. States that might not have had the funding to invest in sectoral or economy-wide programs designed to reduce climate pollution now can — on their own terms, with nearly unlimited creativity.

This repository of action plans is our first opportunity to see how states are collectively approaching and tackling the climate crisis, with a huge amount of new information about each state’s approach to reducing climate pollution.

And a lot of money is on the table to bring these plans into reality. Following up this planning phase, EPA will soon unlock a whopping $4.6 billion in grants that states, Tribes, and other governments can use to implement actions in their Climate Plans. This means the strategies laid out in the state Climate Plans will drive a major national investment to cut climate pollution.

So, what do states want to do with this massive sum of funds? How ambitious are their plans, and what does this tell us about our nationwide climate progress? 

Together, RMI, Climate XChange, and Evergreen Collaborative read a total of 6,795 pages of plans to answer these questions. This is a first look at what can be uncovered, with much more to come. For a complete look at our review, see our spreadsheet here .

By the Numbers — Initial Climate Plan Takeaways

Note: The data included below is a result of our collective first-pass review. As such, there may be minor adjustments made as we continue to dig into the detailed plans.

RMI, Evergreen, and Climate XChange reviewed 47 Climate Plans from 45 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. The states and territories represented collectively account for about 90 percent of the country’s population and carbon pollution. For almost half of the states — 23  — these Climate Plans represent the first meaningful climate action planning effort since at least 2018 , giving a very first view into how they might think about and approach climate action.

Whether a state chose to call its plan a “Priority Resiliency Plan,” “Plan for Environmental Improvement,” “Priority Energy Plan,” or simply “Priority Plan,” it used the opportunity to produce a clear list of measures to reduce climate pollution. These initial plans give advocates critical information to push for continued ambition and effective implementation with IRA funds to support.

Tackling Key Pollution Sources

The most critical component of the Climate Plan is the “priority measures” section that describes which activities, policies, and programs the state will pursue to cut pollution. States have started to articulate and focus their efforts, but we found significant variation in the number of measures and sectors addressed. These measures, or strategies, help us understand how states are planning to address climate pollution. They identify which sectors states are focused on, and whether that correlates with the most polluting sectors within that state or nationwide. The Climate Plans collectively included 654 priority measures to tackle climate change from geographies and political contexts across the spectrum. The plans ranged from 4 priority measures (North Dakota) to 39 (Kansas), with an average of 14 measures per plan.

Of course, it’s not just about the numbers: Some states chose to disaggregate several action items under one single “measure,” while others listed each specific action item as its own measure. For example, Alabama (24 total measures) listed the specific “Establishment of Solar/Charging Infrastructure Supporting Irrigation in Rural Alabama” as one measure, while D.C. (6 total measures) listed several strategies below their third measure, “Accelerate the deployment of local, clean, renewable, and resilient energy.”

The transportation sector — the biggest source of US climate pollution and one with significant opportunity for reductions — had the most measures at 190 across 46 plans (all but two, Colorado and North Dakota). Every single Climate Plan included at least one measure related to the building sector (147 total measures), which is another significant emitter where states-driven solutions are the key to unlocking near-term progress. The third and fourth most addressed sectors were electricity (114 measures in total, included in 41 plans), another giant source of climate pollution, followed by waste (88 measures in 40 plans) where controlling methane can pick up big climate gains fast. This shows us that states are correctly focusing on many of the biggest problems.

But there are gaps too. Industrial measures were underrepresented in the plans (63 measures in 27 plans) despite the sector representing a larger proportion of US climate pollution than buildings and significantly more than waste. As states build on their priority plans and develop their Comprehensive Climate Action Plans due to EPA by roughly summer 2025, it will be important to emphasize that this sector is really not so “ hard-to-abate ,” with many options on the table for states looking to act.

Importantly, including a greater range of sectors in a plan does not necessarily mean greater pollution reduction or higher ambition. Some states chose to narrowly focus their Climate Plan on a couple of specific sectors that they hope to use the CPRG Implementation Grant funding to address, while leveraging other federal and state resources to address remaining sectors. Other states used the Climate Plan to address gaps or scale up their existing approaches and programs, especially for their highest emitting sectors. And still other states used their Climate Plans as a first step in identifying what action is needed — these plans tend to cover more sectors but may have lower ambition for each measure.

Leveraging Big Investments for Big Community Benefits

States are eager to create jobs, support communities, and grow their economies as they take climate action. EPA recommended focusing the Climate Plans on “near-term, high-priority, implementation-ready measures to reduce GHG pollution” — and states did so, while also including a more holistic focus on maximizing co-benefits. We saw that many states were interested in climate strategies that supported economic and health benefits, in addition to tackling greenhouse gas pollution, especially in states where that might make their strategies more politically palatable.

And states are finding ways to use the new federal funds to fill the gaps to reach these benefits. Interestingly, while some states chose measures that had an abundance of additional funding options (logged as “cost-effective” in the below chart), others specifically chose to include measures that couldn’t be funded through other avenues and for which CPRG funds were the best option. This shows that flexible funding streams can be used to complement other programs and incentives by layering or stacking multiple incentives to unlock greater benefits or by filling in coverage gaps left by other programs.

Combining Funding Mechanisms

Combining IRA funds with clear standards provides an untapped opportunity. For the most part, states focused their Climate Plans on voluntary programs and specific projects even though standards can provide important certainty , toward both goal achievement and key industries and markets. Meanwhile, very few states included regulatory measures in their Climate Plans. This could be because they were inspired by the opportunity to use federal funds for “carrots” (usually much more politically popular than “sticks”), due to a lack of regulatory authority from the authoring agency, or because many states interpreted EPA’s “implementation-ready” guidance as “shovel-ready projects.” Where states used their measures to address high-level objectives (e.g., Ohio’s third measure, “Transportation Efficiencies”), they listed a combination of mechanisms to accomplish their desired outcome, listed as “multiple” in the chart below. Critically, 11 percent of the proposed measures across state plans do not clearly and actionably explain the activity, plan, or program, highlighting a need for additional work to make the measure a reality.

Going Above and Beyond

Many states are working to ensure their Climate Plans broadly benefit communities and leverage all available funds, but there is more to do. Per EPA guidance, the Climate Plans had to include four required “elements” or components: a GHG inventory, quantified measures, an analysis of benefits to low-income and disadvantaged communities (LIDACs), and a review of the state’s authority to implement the included measures. The majority of plans (45) included all four elements, while two states were missing one or more. States will be required to address these discrepancies in their follow-up Comprehensive Climate Action Plan.

The Climate Plans could also include five optional elements: GHG pollution projections, GHG reduction targets, an overarching benefits analysis, a plan to leverage additional federal funding, and a workforce planning analysis. Forty-two plans included one or more of the optional elements, while five plans didn’t include any. These optional elements give us a better look into how realistic the plans are, as well as how states plan to operationalize their strategies in ways that will create jobs and community benefits. Most states included a plan to leverage additional federal funding (42 in total), while about half of states included each of the other elements. All states will be required to include these optional elements in the Comprehensive Climate Action Plans in 2025.

States are also engaging a wide range of key stakeholders to inform these plans, bringing communities, industry, and others along in their thinking. To prepare their Climate Plans, states were required  to engage in stakeholder outreach. Early analysis reveals that state Climate Plan engagement reached nearly 16,000 stakeholders and collected roughly the same number of formal comments and suggestions. Our team will be taking a closer look at the depth and breadth of this outreach in future publications.

Big Opportunities Ahead

For the first time ever, states across the country are writing down their plans for meaningful climate action at the same time. We are looking forward to partnering with states, advocates, industry, labor leaders, and communities to strengthen, implement, and expand these Climate Plans, supported by billions of dollars of federal investment. Our first look shows big opportunities ahead, and there’s more to explore.

We are just starting our analysis to ensure states and advocates have the information they need to answer key questions, like:

• Which Climate Plans rise to the top and why?
• Which Climate Plans do a particularly good job of addressing key community needs, including workforce development, environmental justice, and stakeholder engagement?
• What measures stand out as particularly new or innovative?
• What measures might merit scaling across states?
• Which states’ measures are particularly well targeted to their highest emitting sectors, and what key gaps exist within or across state plans?
• How did states fare when engaging in climate planning for the first time, and how much more work remains ahead?
• Which states show a high level of ambition? Are there new emerging climate leaders?

Though relatively high level, these early insights should prove inspiring for state policymakers and advocates by demonstrating the sheer volume of potential climate action contained within the 47 Priority Climate Action Plans. Over the next few months, our team will continue to review these plans to identify additional takeaways from across the country to further advance the transformative climate action these plans could unlock.

By Climate XChange Staff

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Project 2025 partners join right-wing media and climate deniers to celebrate SCOTUS decision overturning Chevron deference

Special Programs Climate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher , Ilana Berger , Evlondo Cooper , Jack Wheatley & John Knefel

Published 06/28/24 6:18 PM EDT

On June 28, the Supreme Court upended 40 years of precedent by overturning Chevron deference , a decision that will restrict federal agencies' regulatory abilities that will also make it easier for corporations to challenge environmental protections, climate action, and rules that protect workers and regulate drugs and financial practices, among other issues.

Undoing Chevron deference has been a central goal of the conservative legal movement and corporate lobbyists for decades, with right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation arguing that “the modern administrative state creates a pervasive system of consolidated power that weakens the checks and balances carefully constructed by the United States Constitution.” Now, Heritage has joined with over 100 other conservative organizations to organize Project 2025 , a comprehensive transition plan to guide the next GOP presidential administration with policy proposals and staffing recommendations. In response to the Supreme Court ruling finally overturning Chevron deference, multiple Project 2025 partners joined right-wing media figures and climate deniers in celebrating the decision.

What is Chevron deference and why overturning it matters

• Chevron deference was a legal principle that required courts to defer to federal agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes they administer. Chevron deference, established in the 1984 decision Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., required courts to defer to federal agencies' “reasonable interpretation” of ambiguous statutes they administer when Congress had not directly addressed the issue. It applied to agency interpretations with the force of law, such as those from formal adjudications or notice-and-comment rulemaking. [Cornell Legal Information Institute, accessed 6/28/24 ]
• The overturning of Chevron deference will significantly shift power away from federal agencies to the courts, potentially impacting a wide range of public protections and regulations. This shift could undermine decades of established policies and practices across many areas of governance. Without Chevron deference, courts may now substitute their own interpretations for complex technical and scientific issues ranging from financial regulations to environmental protections. This could reduce agencies’ ability to respond effectively to evolving challenges, such as the climate crisis, and weaken the government’s ability to implement laws as Congress intended. [Natural Resources Defense Council, accessed 6/28/24 ]
• In her dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan argued that the majority decision upends the balance and separation of power and will impact decision-making around all major issues. “It gives courts the power to make all manner of scientific and technical judgments," Kagan wrote. “It gives courts the power to make all manner of policy calls, including about how to weigh competing goods and values. (See Chevron itself.) It puts courts at the apex of the administrative process as to every conceivable subject—because there are always gaps and ambiguities in regulatory statutes, and often of great import. What actions can be taken to address climate change or other environmental challenges? What will the Nation’s health-care system look like in the coming decades? Or the financial or transportation systems? What rules are going to constrain the development of A.I.? In every sphere of current or future federal regulation, expect courts from now on to play a commanding role. It is not a role Congress has given to them, in the APA or any other statute. It is a role this Court has now claimed for itself, as well as for other judges.” [Supreme Court, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo , 6/28/24 ]
• Legal expert Neal Katyal argued on MSNBC that overturning Chevron deference is “going to impact you and me every single day of our lives.” “This is a massive game change to the way our government is going to operate,” Katyal said. “Justice Kagan's dissent at the very last lines say how dangerous this is, how this shows that this court has no respect for the role of precedent, for stare decisis. She points out that the Supreme Court has relied on this principle of deference, Chevron deference, over 70 times since 1984. Lower courts have relied on it more than 18,000 times. And yet the court blew past all that and totally changed the law in a way that's going to impact you and me every single day of our lives.” [MSNBC, Ana Cabrera Reports , 6/28/24 ]

Project 2025 partners celebrate court’s decision to overturn Chevron and the demise of the “administrative state”

• Heritage senior legal fellow Sarah Parshall Perry posted on X (formerly Twitter) that “SCOTUS overrules the judicially created Chevron doctrine - which has for years given federal executive agencies authority never congressionally delegated to them. … This is a massive shift in judicial dynamics that will curb the advances of the administrative state.” [Twitter/X, 6/28/24 ]
• The Center for Renewing America, headed by former Trump Cabinet official Russ Vought, posted a clip from War Room with a quote from CRA senior fellow Jeff Clark saying, “The Deep State wanted to create a 4th branch of government who would rule over the American people … the Supreme Court wiped that away today.” [Twitter/X, 6/28/24 ]
• Texas Public Policy Foundation executive Chuck DeVore posted on X that “Chevron Deference is dead. … Now Congress will have to do its job, not simply passing vague laws and then letting unelected bureaucrats do their dirty work.” DeVore also claimed that former President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court appointments “made it happen.” [Twitter/X, 6/28/24 ]
• Moms For Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice posted: “Today was a good day for limiting the power of the federal bureaucracy. Chevron is overruled. The Supreme Court limits federal agency power. Citizens have rights in court that federal agencies can’t take away.” [Twitter/X, 6/28/24 ]
• The Job Creators Network released a press statement from its CEO  saying, “The Supreme Court’s decision to overrule the Chevron precedent is a major victory for American small businesses. It finally reins in out-of-control regulators and bureaucrats who have for too long acted as unelected and unaccountable enemies of Main Street.” The group posted a similar message on X, adding, “Overregulation is one of the biggest challenges small businesses face, and this ruling is transformational in diminishing this threat and regulators’ power.” [Job Creators Network, 6/28/24 , 6/28/24 ]
• Competitive Enterprise Institute President Kent Lassman posted: “It’s morning in the Imperial City. Big changes demand long-term vision and a steady application of the correct combination of tools. Today radical and necessary changes to the regulatory state took big steps forward toward the light of liberty.” [Twitter/X, 6/28/24 ]
• Heartland Institute policy adviser Jeff Stier responded, “Don’t believe the headline ‘SCOTUS guts regulators’ power to protect the environment & public health. The end of Chevron Deference is a win for the constitution & We the People. Elected representatives must clearly delegate any power it wants to delegate.” [Twitter/X, 6/28/24 ]
• Former Trump HUD Secretary Ben Carson of the American Cornerstone Institute wrote, “This is a huge victory for limited, constitutional government and reining in the unelected administrative state.” Carson added that his group “urged the Supreme Court to reach just this conclusion in the amicus brief we submitted. We are proud to have played a part in this monumental win.” [Twitter/X, 6/28/24 ]
• Former Trump DHS official and Center for Renewing America senior fellow Ken Cuccinelli wrote that “we have another part of our constitution back … Chevron deference is GONE!” [Twitter/X, 6/28/24 ]
• Horace Cooper of the National Center for Public Policy Research posted that “Supreme Court takes sledgehammer to federal agency power in Chevron case.” He added, “Make no mistake, having a majority of constitutionalists on the Supreme Court ultimately does protect the American people.” [Twitter/X, 6/28/24 ]

Right-wing media figures and climate deniers cheer on the Supreme Court decision overturning 40 years of legal precedent

• Mike Davis, a former law clerk for Justice Neil Gorsch and president of the Article III Project, told Steve Bannon on War Room that the doctrine was unconstitutional and the decision “means a lot for real Americans and real America.” Davis said. “This just shows you how important elections are and how consequential Trump's first term was. He transformed the left-of-center Supreme Court to the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court.” [Real America’s Voice, Steve Bannon’s War Room , 6/28/24 ]
• The Federalist CEO and co-founder Sean Davis wrote: “BREAKING: In a major blow to the unelected administrative state, the Supreme Court has overruled the Chevron doctrine, which required courts to defer to the legal interpretations of unelected bureaucrats.” [Twitter/X, 6/28/24 ]
• National Review senior editor Charles C.W. Cooke: “Chevron is overruled. A great day for the Constitution.” [Twitter/X, 6/28/24 ]
• Climate denier and frequent Fox News contributor Steve Milloy wrote on X that the decision was a “HUGE WINNING,” adding that Trump “made this possible!” [Twitter/X, 6/28/24 , Media Matters, 10/13/21 ]
• Daily Signal editor Tyler O’Neil posted on X that the ruling is “a huge step forward for holding the administrative state—and the deep state—accountable.” [Twitter/X, 6/28/24 ]
• Cato Institute Senior Vice President Clark Neily wrote that “SCOTUS just withdrew a deep reservoir of power from the administrative state.” [Twitter/X, 6/28/24 ]
• Carrie Severino, a former legal clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas and the president of the Leonard Leo-connected Concord Fund (formerly the Judicial Crisis Network), wrote: “Good riddance to Chevron deference, which put a two-ton judicial thumb on the scale of government bureaucrats against the little guy. This is a big victory for the rule of law.” [Twitter/X, 6/28/24 ; ProPublica, 10/11/23 ; CNN, 6/13/24 ]
• Reason Magazine editor Billy Binion wrote: “Congress has ceded its authority to executive agencies & given unelected bureaucrats immense power to interpret vague laws. Today's Chevron decision will force the legislative branch to do its job: Write laws that make sense. That's not a scandal.” [Twitter/X, 6/28/24 ]
• Former GOP candidate and climate denier Vivek Ramaswamy wrote on X that “this is a *seismic* ruling,” claiming Chevron deference “has poisoned our country in recent decades.” He added that “unelected bureaucrats in the administrative state” will no longer make the laws, and “America is better off for it.” [Twitter/X, 6/28/24 ; Rolling Stone, 8/23/23 ]
• The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles posted a video about the “Earth-shattering, groundbreaking” decision, saying that the Supreme Court “just gutted the deep state” and that it’s nearly as consequential for the right as Roe v. Wade getting overturned. “Conservatives have considered this a major source of the unaccountability of government, the bloat of government, the capricious rule that we have,” Knowles said in the video. “I’m not saying that it rises to the level of a Dobbs decision overruling Roe,” he concluded, “but in some ways, from a structure of government perspective, it sort of does.” [Twitter/X, 6/28/24 ]
• Far-right influencer Ian Miles Cheong wrote on X that the decision prevents agencies from “coming up with onerous regulations that force companies to pay salaries to government observers whose job is to act like unwanted nannies,” celebrating that it “stops federal agencies from being able to force compliance with mask mandates and COVID vaccines onto companies.” [Twitter/X, 6/28/24 ]
• Climate denier Chris Martz wrote that the Chevron doctrine “allowed unelected bureaucrats to interpret the law as they pleased and create boundless rules and regulations on businesses,” calling the new ruling overturning it “a major win for the Constitution. ” [Twitter/X, 6/28/24 ; AFP Fact Check, 5/1/24 ]
• Epoch Times contributor Hans Mahncke wrote: “The invalidation of the Chevron deference, which gave DC bureaucrats largely unchecked authority to create rules and regulations, is arguably the most significant constraint of the administrative state in generations. This is a major victory for rule of law and democracy.” [Twitter/X, 6/28/24 ]

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Every four years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency works in partnership to prepare Strategic Research Action Plans (StRAPs) for each of its six national research programs. Each StRAP identifies Agency research goals and presents a roadmap to keep the Agency on track and accountable to meet those goals.

The current plan (2023–2026) is the fourth to be developed. The previous StRAPs covered FYs 2012-2016, 2016-2019 and 2019-2022. The previous StRAPs can be found  here:

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