NEPA ratings: what have we learned?

摘要

In the United States, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires preparation of an environmental impact statement (EIS) when there is a potential for significant environmental impact by a major federal action. Preparation of these documents is a task taken seriously by federal agencies. At every Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Regional Office there are at least one to two full-time employees working on NEPA along with staff members at EPA headquarters. This does not include the contractor staff that supports EPA or the multitudes of government employees and contractors preparing draft environmental impact statements (DEISs) across the country. When a DEIS is completed, the EPA reviews it and provides comments in the Federal Registrar, as required under Section 309 of the Clean Air Act. To achieve this mandate, EPA has created an environmental review process that uses two scales to evaluate DEIS. One is a four point rating scale that evaluates the environmental impact of the proposed action. The categories include: lack of objections (LO); environmental concerns (EC); environmental objections (EO); and environmentally unsatisfactory (EU) (see Table 1). Specifically, the evaluation is based on impact of the preferred alternative on the environment (EPA 1984). The other scale is a three-point scale that categorizes the adequacy of information presented in the DEIS. The information categories include adequate, insufficient information and inadequate (see Table 2).