Our Impact

Environment Care combines advanced scientific methods with innovative approaches to governance in diverse areas of the world, to ensure transparency and to support citizen voice & empowerment. We promote local environmental justice clinics (see graphic below) providing pro bono legal work in affected communities. We are educating law & science students and training public interest lawyers and judges to help deliver solutions to harmful exposures. Longer term, our activities aim to underpin the future development of tailored solutions – allowing, for example, the replacement of toxic chemicals, the introduction of targeted barriers to exposure, or recycling offending compounds into safe products.

The environmental governance remedies are diverse and range from market regulated to government mandated approaches. To determine how best to intervene, we: (1) Identify the market failure, i.e. where a cost is inflicted on society that is not reflected in the price of doing business (by public health & social science research); (2) Evaluate the cost of these harms (by economics); and (3) Examine potential instruments to account for this cost so to mitigate or remedy harms (involving law & political science), considering the specific context in which the transaction is occurring (involving social science & economics).

Likewise, the precision toxicology investigation progresses from uncertainty to greater certainty, identifying the health conditions and chemical mixtures prevalent in the community through stages of research that increasingly sharpen the association between pollution and the cause of harm to human health. These progressive stages of precision toxicology research begin with (1) informational investigation, acting on community-­identified priorities to produce data on the chemical and health conditions present; (2) proceed to linkages indicative of causation, suggesting potential pathways of exposure to chemicals of high concentration with potential toxicological outcomes; (3) demonstrate relational associations, qualitatively describing toxicity pathways by which specific mixtures of the identified chemicals induce adverse health outcomes; (4) enable probative analysis, quantitatively determining how the community became exposed to the harmful chemicals and how these problems can be corrected; and (5) generate predictive knowledge, prospectively indicating how such harms could be prevented in the future through processes such as containment or chemical re-­engineering.

Conditions are just right

Environment Care is well timed to halt elevated patterns of mortality under forces of economic development. Environmental governance efforts are taking root in major industrialising nations, irrespective of their political systems. Legal reforms in China, India, and Bangladesh that support public interest litigation are giving communities a voice in exercising their right to health. In China, the 2014 revision to the Environmental Protection Law allows NGOs and government prosecutors’ offices to sue those causing pollution, ecological damage, and harming public interest. By April 2017, China’s Supreme People’s Court accepted 189 public interest environmental cases, of which 60% were brought by environmental NGOs.

In addition to a National Green Tribunal in which environmental scientists and lawyers hear cases together, the Indian Supreme Court in 2017 established the Social Justice Bench (SJB) in its endeavour to frame and mobilise responses to environmental protection, human rights, and social justice issues. Public interest litigation before the SJB now invokes a cooperative and collaborative process allowing socially sensitive adjudication involving the petitioner and the state or public authority. The Court employs dialogue, contestation, and norms for eliciting grounded factual realities including court-­appointed scientific experts to deliver environmental justice. Bangladesh hosts public interest litigation, brought by affected parties or NGOs, as a vehicle for environmental democracy, arising out of section 102 of the Constitution, which allows the courts to declare a breach of fundamental rights.

However, such cases frequently fail due to insufficient evidence connecting sources of pollution to specific harms. The conditions for scientists to engage in the environmental justice process are right for real change to happen.