Issue #6: The Enforcement Staircase: Administrative, Civil, and Criminal
Most environmental violations never come close to a courtroom. Permit exceedances are typically self-reported and logged in a public database, and that may be the extent of the matter.
Issue #5: Your Supplier’s Risk is your Risk
Companies have traditionally tracked supplier disruption risks, such as financial health, single-source dependency, and geographic concentration. Most haven’t built a supplier’s EHS record into that picture. That’s a gap.
Issue #4: Half your water data is public. The other half isn’t.
The Clean Water Act has done more to improve the physical condition of America’s waterways than any other law or policy I can think of. Before it passed in 1972, many of the nation’s lakes and rivers were unsafe for fishing or swimming.
Issue #3: Chemical Accidents Are Rising and Your Supply Chain May Own Part of the Risk
Serious chemical accidents hit a five-year high in 2025, and most companies have no way to see that risk sitting inside their own supply chain. We’ve covered regulators using AI to target inspections and outside groups gathering their own emissions data. This week, the story moves further down the chain, to what happens when the incident isn’t at your facility at all. It’s at your supplier’s.
Issue #2: Data Access Has Widened, and Environmental Monitoring Just Got Cheap
Last week I covered how regulators are increasingly using AI to decide who gets inspected. That’s one part of the story. Another part is that the government isn’t the only one watching.
What used to stay behind the fence line no longer does. Companies need to understand that.
Issue #1: Regulators are now using AI to target their inspections. Is your team running the same analysis?
After more than 20 years running criminal investigations at the EPA, and the years since helping companies work through compliance strategy, I kept seeing the same gap. The people making the call on EHS risk weren’t seeing the same picture that regulators and NGOs were already building. The information was there. Nobody was translating it at the right level, at the right pace.
