This annual survey describes new environmental laws that were signed into law in 2010 in New York, as well as two executive orders issued by Governor David A. Paterson and important new regulations from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation concerning endangered and threatened species. The new laws discussed in this survey include the following topics: Air Quality, Brownfields, Endangered Species, Energy, Emissions/Climate Change, Green Jobs, Hazardous Substances, Land Use, Pesticides, Public Health, Recycling, State Environmental Quality Review Act, Solid Waste, Transportation, Wetlands, and Wildlife.

Data from states and municipalities across the country suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic is disproportionately affecting people of color in the United States. This report analyzes emerging data on deaths, unemployment, failing businesses, and wealth inequality to assess the links between racial and ethnic economic inequities, structural racism, and the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on people of color.

Incarceration puts both incarcerated people and corrections staff at risk of contracting COVID-19. A wide array of criminal justice stakeholders have come together to call for a public health-oriented approach to the COVID-19 crisis. The key recommendations include releasing incarcerated individuals, limiting new additions to closed correctional settings, addressing violations of COVID-19 related orders through a public health approach (rather than with criminalization), connecting public health organizations and criminal justice stakeholders, and utilizing innovations that promote integration of public health priorities into the justice system.

Organizers in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina conducted interviews with over 900 Latinx immigrants (including nearly 400 undocumented community members) about the important issues facing immigrant communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. This infographic features snippets of the stories shared; common themes include financial hardship and illness, compounded by a lack of government support.

An executive order directing City departments to further extend their actions to combat the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and to mitigate the impact of the public health emergency on the people of Seattle.

This report serves as a resource for developing smoke-free workplace laws and is a companion piece to the Prohibition of Smoking in all Workplaces and Public Places model ordinance. The report provides recommendations for developing, drafting, and implementing a smoke-free workplace model ordinance. It includes sections on guiding principles, drafting principles, deal breakers, additional provisions to avoid, and campaign tips. This report is periodically updated by Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights, please contact the organization to ensure you have the most recent version of the document.

This report serves as a resource for developing smoke-free indoor air laws and is a companion piece to the Prohibition of Smoking in all Workplaces and Public Places model ordinance. The report outlines common errors to avoid while developing and drafting an ordinance that prohibits smoking indoors. This report is periodically updated by Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights, please contact the organization to ensure you have the most recent version of the document.

Though the United States has a large and highly developed pharmaceutical industry, it operates on an extractive model that contributes to inequality and increasingly produces drug shortages, inefficiency, lagging innovation, misinformation and misuse of medications, and the world’s highest drug prices. These poor outcomes are the natural consequence of an industry oriented around the goal of maximizing profit above all else. This report outlines a model for a structural alternative—public ownership in the pharmaceutical sector—and offers initial considerations about the potential benefits of such a model for national health and wellbeing, the economy and democracy.

Public spaces are crucial to a community’s collective well-being. Although public spaces are intended to be equally accessible, young people, particularly low-income BIPOC, are made to feel unwelcome or excluded in many public spaces by the built environment, police, and other users. This report provides design recommendations for new forms of public spaces that are inclusive to all community members.

This report calls for national leadership and healthcare sector collaboration to create production capacity for American-sourced and manufactured Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) supplies. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the many vulnerabilities in global supply chains which can make it difficult to access basic supplies, such as PPE. As the pandemic has hit supply chains hard, the reorganization in a post-pandemic world is inevitable and this reorganization must meet the inadequacies and inefficiencies head-on. The report itself is broken into two sections. The first is research on the PPE supply chains and economic analysis of the US PPE industry. The second looks into interviews conducted with health care system executives to review common perspectives and policy recommendations that could tackle the issues COVID-19 has uncovered.