Bringing Environmental Assessment into the Digital Age

Imagine that you are a researcher who is interested in the environmental impacts of projects affecting a particular species of animal or watershed. No central registry exists with this information. The only way of locating the relevant environmental assessments would be to identify each potential government agency, federal, state, and local, that might be involved in such projects, and then to make a document request from each individual agency. Some of the documents would be available only in hard copy once they were found, although more recent documents might be available on compact disk. Moreover, many agencies might be unable to locate the documents themselves because there is no systematic tracking of the most common forms of environmental assessments. It would be a significant step forward simply to make all environmental impact information available online. Combining such a database with an efficient search engine, and linking this and other environmental information through a geographic information system (GIS), could transform our ability to access environmental information. We can also try to link assessments with monitoring and other later site information, so that we can begin to evaluate our predictions and mitigation measures. This may seem a pedestrian concept. It certainly involves no new technological breakthroughs or major legal reforms. For this reason, it is all the more dismaying that environmental information is still stranded in the era of paper copies and steel filing cabinets.