Findings and Recommendations - Science For Environmental Protection: The Road Ahead - page 184

Most of the agency's science needs will probably continue to be met by
research and collaboration performed through existing means. However, EPA
also has the potential to acquire more information through collaboration with the
public. For example, the explosion of new Internet-based, wireless, and minia-
turized sensing technologies provides an unprecedented opportunity to involve
the public in research and in meeting data-collection needs in ways that were not
possible in the past. The emergence of secure enterprise social networks also
provides a host of opportunities for EPA to greatly enhance internal and external
collaboration. There is potential for the collection of environmental information
and the sorting and analysis of complex data to be accomplished through citizen
science, crowdsourcing, and similar techniques. EPA will need to continue to
follow new and emerging technologies closely and make anticipatory decisions
for adoption where its mission can be addressed in a cost-effective way.
Even if resources were not a major constraint, EPA would still need the
expertise to be able to harness the science, data, information, tools, techniques,
equipment, and expertise available from research being done in other organiza-
tions domestically and internationally. As resources dedicated to research be-
come more limited, tracking, gathering, and using such knowledge becomes
even more essential.
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 3c: The committee recommends that EPA improve its
ability to track systematically, to influence, and in some cases to engage in
collaboration with research being done by others in the United States and
internationally.
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.