Editor’s Note 2022

Over the past 33 years, Environmental Claims Journal (ECJ) articles have addressed environmental contaminants and exposures, environmental regulations and education, environmental liabilities and claims, technologies to reduce environmental exposures, and insurance solutions to transfer and mitigate monetary responsibility. While the Editor’s Note in the first two decades previewed ECJ’s published articles, this Note will similarly provide examples of some of the topics and information learned over the past three years. The goal of pursuing and achieving better environmental outcomes to protect our health, environment and natural resources should be universally accepted and adopted. However, as stated in last year’s Note, environmental laws and regulations are often made without regard to their clarity, practical implementation, enforcement, or economic consequences. Laws are often made for political reasons rather than being practical, effective, or enforceable. Ultimately, there are significant costs involved to comply environmental laws and regulations and for resulting injuries. These costs, which include costs for prevention, damages and losses will largely be spread among individuals, companies, governments, and environmental insurance companies. As such, individuals and companies need to be more proactive with exploring insurance solutions to transfer individual and corporate responsibility to insurance companies before the environmental issue becomes a known pollution condition or claim. To the extent any bulleted topic below is of interest, you should be able to locate the published article or articles from the past few years or please contact me.