Launch of a National Research Council Study, Incorporating Sustainability in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
An ad hoc committee under the Science and Technology for Sustainability Program (STS) will author a consensus report for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s Office of Research and Development (ORD) to help define their efforts to incorporate sustainability concepts into agency programs. This study will build on existing sustainability efforts that ORD has conducted by strengthening the analytic and scientific basis for sustainability as it applies to human health and environmental protection within the Agency’s decision-making process. The study will address such questions as:
1. What should be the operational framework for sustainability for EPA?
2. How can the EPA decision-making process rooted for more than two decades in the risk assessment/risk management paradigm be integrated into this new sustainability framework?
3. What scientific and analytical tools are needed to support the framework?
4. What set of strategic metrics and indicators should EPA build to determine if sustainable approaches are or are not being employed successfully?
5. Which assessment techniques and accounting protocols should the Agency adopt to inform ongoing efforts to improve Agency sustainability practices and procedures?
In addition, the committee will make recommendations to strengthen the Agency’s transdisciplinary sustainability science research program by answering the following questions: What are the core questions for a sustainability science research program at EPA? What characteristics are indicative of a research program that is addressing sustainability?
The National Research Council (NRC) study will seek to operationalize the risk assessment/risk management (RA/RM) paradigm within a sustainability framework. This study will build on the advice in the NRC report Risk Assessment in the Federal Government: Managing the Process, the 2009 report Science and Decisions: Advancing Risk Assessment as well as other pertinent literature on the RA/RM process.
The committee will also build on the advice in the NRC’s recently completed report Evaluating Research Efficiency in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as well as EPA’s innovation programs and the extensive literature on U.S. and global efforts to incorporate sustainability into environmental protection programs.
The study will be widely disseminated to interested audiences within federal and state governments, industry, universities and nongovernmental organizations. It will inform the STS companion study, “Sustainability Linkages in the Federal Government,” which will examine critical links between key sectors that need to be considered by federal science and resource management agencies.