ELI In the News

Food waste has gotten a lot of attention lately, and rightly so. In the United States, we trash up to 40 percent of our post-harvest food supply. But there’s another, more insidious form of waste that plagues our food system—and it’s baked right in. We devote more than 100 million acres of U.S. land to growing crops that don’t contribute efficiently to our food system and in some cases pose an outright threat to our health and the environment. Federal agriculture policies have a powerful impact on decisions made at the farm level. We need government policies that support the use of farmland for nutritious food—as well as conservation and climate protection—not for wasteful products.

President Trump bragged about “massively streamlining” the approval process for infrastructure projects such as bridges and roads with the Ohio River as a backdrop as steel company executives, labor leaders and local and federal officials looked on. Mr. President: This is not a new issue, as I know all too well from my work on it over the past 15 years. And there’s a lot of policy on the books for addressing it. Of course, history goes much further back, namely to an elegantly simple set of protections signed into law in 1970 by the Nixon administration.

President Donald Trump has decided to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement on Climate, signed by 195 nations and formally joined by 147 of them, including the United States. The United States now joins Syria and Nicaragua as the only nations in the world not supporting the accord, reached in 2015 at the United Nations annual climate summit in Paris.

A Pitt County native and East Carolina University graduate now living and teaching in Louisiana became ECU’s second alumnus to receive a prestigious national award for his work in wetlands research. On May 18, Robert Twilley of Ayden was presented the 2017 Science Research Award, one of the five Environmental Law Institute National Wetlands Awards presented at the U.S. Botanical Garden in Washington, D.C.

The number of sensors collecting environmental data is growing rapidly, and the collected data offers the potential for a wealth of insights. The Environmental Law Institute provides a sampling of big data projects in its report “Big Data and Environmental Protection: An Initial Survey of Public and Private Initiatives.”

Move would be 'a foolish mistake,' say environmentalists. If White House sources are to be trusted, it appears that Donald Trump is all set to pull out of the Paris climate change agreement. The long-expected move by a president who has called global warming a hoax created by the Chinese is sure to further worsen the United States’ relationship with its allies.

JURIST Guest Columnist Jay Austin of the Environmental Law Institute discusses President Trump's recent executive order concerning offshore drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf.

Speakers at the Environmental Law Institute’s National Wetlands Awards panel discussion May 17 know there are challenges ahead as the Trump administration launches its efforts to fix the flawed Obama-era “waters of the United States” (WOTUS) rule, including how it may affect wetlands mitigation banks.

With support from Hurricane Sandy funding, Delaware is developing outreach strategies to help concentrate efforts and funding around hot spots for marsh migration to minimize impacts on coastal communities and agricultural producers...In December 2016, the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) and the Mid Atlantic Regional Council on the Ocean (MARCO) released a report that provides a comprehensive look at wetland prioritization activities and tools -- from vulnerability mapping to policies that support living shorelines -- in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, to give practitioners a sense of how peers in their states, and beyond, are working toward resilience.

No matter how efficient a new development may be, growth always comes at a price, with increased demand for water one of the more tangible costs. In areas already experiencing water scarcity, it’s also potentially one of the biggest challenges to long-term sustainability.That’s why the Alliance for Water Efficiency, Environmental Law Institute, and River Network recently released a tool to help communities plan for water-neutral growth.