Building Science for Environmental Protection in the 21st Century - Science For Environmental Protection: The Road Ahead - page 118

Finding: Research on environmental issues is not confined to EPA. In the
United States, it is spread across a number of federal agencies, national laborato-
ries, and universities and other public-sector and private-sector facilities. There
are also strong programs of environmental research in the public and private
sectors in many other nations.
Recommendation: The committee recommends that EPA improve its ability
to track systematically, to influence, and in some cases to engage in collabo-
ration with research being done by others in the United States and interna-
tionally.
The committee suggests the following mechanisms for approaching the
recommendation above:
 Identify knowledge that can inform and support the agency's current
regulatory agenda.
 Institute strategies to connect that knowledge to those in the agency
who most need it to carry out the agency's mission.
 Inform other federal and nonfederal research programs about the sci-
ence base that the agency currently needs or believes that it will need to execute
its mission.
 Seek early identification of new and emerging environmental problems
with which the agency may have to deal.
Crosscutting Example of an Opportunity to
Stay at the Leading Edge of Science
As EPA strives to conduct science that anticipates, innovates, takes the
long view, and is collaborative, it will be useful for the agency to draw on recent
examples to understand in practical terms how it might apply these approaches
effectively and in an integrated fashion. The committee describes one such ex-
ample above in the discussion of the emergence of nanotechnologies and how
EPA can better anticipate new technologies. Another broader example, which
cuts across all aspects of improving EPA science, is the issue of hydraulic frac-
turing of shale for natural gas (or hydrofracking). See Box 4-2.
ENHANCED TOOLS AND SKILLS FOR APPLYING
SYSTEMS THINKING TO INFORM DECISIONS
Leading-edge science will produce large amounts of new information
about the state of human health and ecologic systems and the likely effects of
introducing a variety of pollutants or other perturbations into the systems. In
particular, many multifactorial problems require systems thinking that can be