EDGI's EEW events engage members of the public in the process of report-making, from delving into the data science and running Jupyter Notebooks to sharing stories about their home areas. Over the summer, we co-hosted workshops with the Sunrise Movement Boston Hub, as well as a four-part public workshop series dedicated to the completion of EEW Congressional Report Cards for two key committees. In commitment to the principles of EDJ, all of our code and data are available on EDGI’s GitHub, an open-source coding platform. Find recordings of past EEW events below, including our headlining Democratizing Data: Panel Discussion & Report Release webinar which was held on October 22nd.

Recordings of past events:

• Democratizing Environmental Data: Panel Discussion & Report Release (10/22/2020)
• EEW Public Hours workshop 4 (9/10/2020)
• EEW Public Hours workshop 1 (8/20/2020)
• Sunrise Boston Hub workshop (7/18/2020)

You can EEW, too.

Importantly, these workshops are not meant to center EDGI or the EEW team. Rather, we hope that every workshop will be co-hosted by one or more partner organizations: community groups, national environmental watchdogs, research hubs, and everything in between. We are here to help you answer pressing questions and create materials and networks that support your advocacy and organizing efforts.

EEW workshops begin with collective report-making through the Jupyter Notebooks, followed by breakout sessions into different tracks based on participants’ own skills and interests. The outcomes of the various tracks will then be compiled into a single report that is informative, visually interesting, and oriented toward community action. Building on the Congressional Report Cards project, we aim to compile EEW reports into an interactive map or repository to demonstrate the power of collective action and data stewardship in addressing unchecked environmental violence. Additionally, we encourage—and can help facilitate—partners and participants to develop other creative outcomes and demonstrations from these workshops.

EEW Data Tools & Event Structure

ECHO includes compliance data on air, water, and hazardous waste laws for all facilities permitted to emit, store, and use hazardous materials. It also includes data on inspections and enforcement actions taken by EPA and state agencies. It is the first database to publicly share federal environmental enforcement data. However, the website itself can be hard for non-specialists to use and understand. To increase ECHO’s public accessibility, the EEW team is developing a series of Jupyter Notebooks—collaborative, open-source data analysis tools—so people can use this information from ECHO to make customizable reports on pollution from facilities in areas of interest. These can gather information about EPA inspections of these sites, whether facilities are complying with federal regulations, and if EPA has responded to violations with enforcement actions. We’ve already written the code to generate reports based on the data—during the workshops, participants simply run the notebook to generate a report for their area of interest. No coding or data science experience is needed!

So far, we have developed Notebooks that generate several different types of report metrics, all of which can be found in EDGI’s GitHub repositories. One gathers data on facility inspections, violations, and enforcement actions for three different regulatory statutes CAA, CWA, RCRA at the zip-code, congressional district, and county level. Another allows users to investigate a specific facility of concern across the same three regulatory statutes. A specialized notebook was developed to analyze declining enforcement during the COVID-19 crisis in order to supplement EDGI’s COVID Enforcement Report.

Tutorial videos

• Jupyter Notebook Demo
• EEW Demo Video

We want to make environmental compliance data more accessible and useful through our Jupyter Notebooks and supplementing the numbers with community stories, compelling data visualizations, and contextual research.

Interested in hosting an EEW event? Email us at environmentalenforcementwatch@gmail.com