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Community Air Pollution Monitoring in Taiwan

tschuetz

From Tu (2020): "In Taiwan, the community air-monitoring projects often have difficulties in identifying the specific pollution sources due to the historical patterns of industrial development that tend to set up dense clusters of different factories in the industrial parks along the west coast (Liu 2012).3 The agglomeration of polluting facilities complicates pollution identification that further creates significant knowledge gaps between the predicted emission, the actual emission, and the community sensory experiences throughout the policy process. This pattern of development has somehow constrained Taiwan community air monitoring to target the specific polluters."

4. How scales (county, regional, neighborhood, census tract) can be seen through this data resource?

mtebbe

Facilities and enforcement case searches can both easily be limited by geography (EPA region, city, state, zip code, county, proximity to national border, and watershed). The tool also automatically produces maps that allow users to see the distribution of facilities across space.

3. What data is drawn into the data resource and where does it come from?

mtebbe

This database uses a broad variety of data. Most of the data is collected by the EPA itself. Users are able to search for facilities regulated under the following systems:

  • Risk Management Plan (RMP)
  • Toxic Release Inventory (TRI)
  • National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) - under the Clean Water Act
  • ICIS-Air
  • Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) - hazardous waste
  • Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA)
  • Superfund Enterprise Management System (SEMS)
  • Clean Air Markets Division Business System (CAMDBS)
  • Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP)
  • Emissions Inventory System
  • Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA)

When looking at individual facilities, the database provides detailed facility reports, enforcement case reports (civil and criminal), air pollutant reports, effluent charts, pollutant loading reports, effluent limit exceedances reports, CWA program area reports, permit limits reports, and other facility documents as available. The database provides easy ways to download and map the data. The database also allows users to narrow facilities searches using demographic data from EJScreen (also maintained by the EPA), the U.S. Census, and tribal land data.

Users can also look for information on federal administrative and judicial enforcement actions through an enforcement case search.

1. What is this data resource called and how should it be cited?

mtebbe

The Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) Database, maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) Database. 2022. Available online: https://echo.epa.gov/ (accessed on 17 March 2022).

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Alexi Martin

The aim of this organization is to use medicine and science to record and focus on mass atrocities and human rights violations. The organization was founded on the idea that health care professionals possess skills that pose credibility to those who are persecuted sexually, morally, socially and economically. As health care professionals, they have the opportunity to hold people accountable for their actions. Examples of this include torture, sexual violence, civil unrest- it is their job to protect civilians' basic human rights.

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Alexi Martin

This organization has invesitgated ad exposed the use of chemical weapons on civilazations in Iraq, exhumed mass graves in Bosnia and Rwanda. They seaked to expose government torture and abuse of civial rights in many countries including-Columbia, Mexico, Peru, Sierra Leone and others. They approach disaster and emergency response through trying to stop them by exposing abuses to human rights. They investigate using human accounts and first hand experience. Through using their resources to expose injustice. They have won a noble peace prize for documenting landmine injuries and calling to ban them.

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Alexi Martin

This group claims to have a new way of addressing emergency situations through using their process of stopping events that are already in progress through investigating the abuses, documenting evidence and stories and using their evidence as a call for action.

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Alexi Martin

The events that motivated their ways of thinking about disaster and health was in 1981 a physician in Boston was called to go to Chilie to investigate the 'disapperance' of three physicians. Johnathan Fine entered the country and met the doctors who were psychologically terrorized. He heard their testimonies and recorded the,. It inspired him to go to Guatemala, Philipines and South Korea to educate about human rights globally. Dr Fine's visit caused the doctors to be released; he decided he wanted to help these people in situations about this full time. In 1986 Robert Laurence, Jean Mayer and Fine created Physicians for Human Rights.