Enforcement Data: A Tool for Environmental Management

摘要

Information is a key factor in shaping and regulating environmental behavior from various perspectives: that of a stockholder looking into the sound nature of an investment, of a consumer choosing a product, or of a government official determining compliance with law. The authors of this Article set out to identify and collate what they thought would be a significant amount of environmental compliance information available on the Internet that could serve these purposes. In so doing, however, they discovered that while the basic technical infrastructure exists within the current state and federal databases, there are few sources of enforcement information that are truly accessible and useful to the consumer, investor, and even the regulatory community. The authors thus argue for a publicly accessible assemblage of existing enforcement and compliance data from all environmental regulatory agencies. While the data presented below demonstrate what information is available to the public today, more importantly, they serve as a starting point for the eventual goal of providing the public with all enforcement data in an accessible format.