Environmental Planning for Communities: A Guide to the Environmental Visioning Process Utilizing a Geographic Information System.

摘要

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has shifted the focus of many of its ecosystem protection programs from command-and-control to the Community-Based Environmental Protection (CBEP) approach. In contrast to the previous regulatory approach, the CBEP approach emphasizes decision making by local stakeholders to address community-wide environmental issues. As an essential step in the CBEP approach, community leaders, citizens, and planners develop an environmental vision of their preferred 'green' community. An environmental vision in its simplest form is a picture or a description of a preferred future state of the community, chosen from several alternative futures. The entire process of generation and selection of alternative landscape futures will be referred to as environmental visioning in this Guide. One of the important tools that can be used to develop and support such a vision is the geographic information system (GIS) technology.