Article by Shannon Dosemagen, Gwen Ottinger: “…maintaining healthy communities requires information. To respond effectively to accidents and releases, residents and emergency responders need real-time measurements of hazardous chemicals in the air. Residents who observe soot or dust blanketing their communities need information about its chemical composition to share with their health providers. Closing the refinery in Benicia requires still more information, so the city can understand the levels of toxins left in the soil and the risks of further exposures from clean-up processes. Faced with the choice between the razing of an oil refinery and its conversion to a renewables facility, communities should be able to compare the status quo with expected emissions and safety risks for multiple future scenarios.
Creating the kind of knowledge base necessary for such consequential decisions would require long-term coordination across the many communities affected by energy infrastructure. Places like Benicia, Martinez, and Rodeo would need a place to store data about pollution before, during, and after major changes at nearby energy facilities. They would need to have a way of sharing their data and analyses with other similarly situated communities if they chose to do so, and they would need to be able to access data and analyses from other communities just as easily. Academic and nonprofit researchers with a bird’s eye view of the issues could also enhance knowledge infrastructures if they had access to data shared by communities and a way not only to disseminate their findings, but to share their methodologies for communities to adapt and deploy.
Existing data infrastructures can’t support this kind of collective learning about environmental issues. Both the technical and governance aspects of the infrastructure would need significant upgrades, and the customary models for funding science in the United States don’t offer the kinds of investment that would be necessary. Funding is typically structured around short grant cycles and discrete deliverables, making it difficult to support the long-term, shared stewardship that this infrastructure requires. Addressing these hurdles could enable creation of a robust environmental knowledge commons maintained by a plethora of users and contributors. Such a commons could ensure the continued capacity to generate new insights about the impacts of pollution and environmental change, forming a durable basis for evidence-informed public policy, whether or not the federal government continues to support environmental science. An environmental knowledge commons could, moreover, offer a model for ongoing advancement in other fields of science where traditional funding models have become precarious, even as their knowledge remains essential to public well-being…(More)”.
