PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Policy and Governance
From Data to Decisions: A Gap in Screening-Level Decision Support for Pharmaceutical Environmental Policy
Provisionally accepted
- 1Polytechnic School, Pasadena, United States
- 2Stanford University, Stanford, United States
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Digital information systems are increasingly shaping environmental governance by expanding access to chemical evidence and supporting regulatory analysis. In pharmaceutical environmental policy, regulatory agencies have invested heavily in data infrastructure that aggregates toxicological, exposure, and occurrence information. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) platforms such as the CompTox Chemicals Dashboard and the Water Contaminant Information Tool (WCIT) exemplify this shift toward large-scale, open information provision. At the same time, many environmental policy decisions begin well before formal risk assessment. At the screening stage, decision-makers often determine which pharmaceutical substances warrant further monitoring, assessment, or regulatory attention. These judgments are made under conditions of uncertainty, limited administrative capacity, and competing policy objectives. While existing platforms excel at data access, they offer limited support for synthesis, trade-off reasoning, and justification at this early decision stage. This Perspective focuses on the gap between data provision and screening-level decision support in pharmaceutical environmental governance. Using examples from widely used EPA information systems and pharmaceutical prioritization literature, the Perspective highlights that complementary analytical, visual, and procedural decision-support approaches could strengthen transparency and usability without replacing existing regulatory databases. Addressing this gap represents a constructive opportunity for interdisciplinary environmental research at the interface of science, policy, and decision making.
Keywords: Data provision, Decision support systems, decision-making, environmental governance, Pharmaceutical contaminants, screening
Received: 11 Jan 2026; Accepted: 09 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Shi and Xue. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Danna Xue
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.