Are environmental regulations working?: a visual analytic approach to answering their impact on toxic emissions

Abstract

Acquisition and analysis of environmental data are essential to the quality, safety and health of human life, and typically consist of heterogeneous, multivariate, and spatio-temporal information collected from different resources. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for protecting human health and the environment; it does so by developing and enforcing regulations to monitor the environment and reduce pollution. In this work, our goal is to obtain a deeper understanding of the effectiveness and impact of EPA regulations; we present preliminary work on an interactive visualization system that attempts to answer specific questions as a function of the dimensions of interest. We demonstrate our system on toxic chemical release reductions resulting from the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR), focusing on the electric utilities sector. We have received positive feedback from our domain expert (toxicologist at the US EPA), indicating that our initial results can more effectively communicate the impacts of environmental regulations, through providing strong visual correlation tools that are currently not available.