NEPA and climate change: consideration of climate mitigation and adaptation in infrastructure review processes

Abstract

Addressing climate change requires a shift in the planning, design, and operations of infrastructure. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions will require decarbonizing energy, water, transportation, and other infrastructures. And the long-term resilience of many infrastructure projects will be affected by expected changes in precipitation, sea level, heat and cold spells, and natural hazards like hurricanes and wildfires. Many scholars and practitioners have suggested that Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) --a required review of the environmental impacts of infrastructure projects--can serve as an opportunity to encourage infrastructure to be more climate friendly. In the United States (like many other jurisdictions), federal agencies are not required to address climate change in EIA reviews, but guidance from the Council on Environmental Quality advises them to consider greenhouse gas emissions and the effects of climate change. This paper applied qualitative content analysis to assess integration of climate change into Environmental Impact Statements (EISs) in the United States. We found that most EISs included some consideration of climate change, most frequently with a few brief mentions rather than extensive integration. We also found more focus on climate mitigation than adaptation, in both recognizing potential impacts and managing those impacts. Surprisingly, infrastructure that is more directly related to climate change--water and energy infrastructure, as well as land management--had lower overall climate integration than transportation, information technology, or buildings and operations. As exploratory work, this research suggests that federal agencies could do more to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions in approved projects and in particular to make infrastructure more adaptive to climate change. The work also raises a number of questions as to whether EIA is the right regulatory tool to encourage climate friendly infrastructure.

Confronting Current Crises and Critical Challenges of Climate Change

“…Automated text analysis can automatically analyze and extract meaningful information from text data through sentiment analysis, topic modeling, named entity recognition, and text classification, among others. Ulibarri & Han (2022) apply qualitative content analysis to assess the integration of climate change into Environmental Impact Statements (EISs) in the United States. Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is a globally-used tool to form the environmental and social sustainability of infrastructure systems.…”

Environmental Justice at the Environmental Regulation in Indonesia and Uzbekistan

“…49 These include the provision of fresh water, the establishment of public green spaces, the mitigation of flood risks, and the amelioration of climate change impacts. 50 Since the 1980s, various sources such as government reports, academic scholarship, and investigative journalism have consistently identified a pattern wherein racial and ethnic minorities, indigenous groups, individuals with lower levels of education, linguistically isolated households, and low-income communities are disproportionately affected by or susceptible to a diverse array of environmental burdens. These groups are also exposed to procedural imbalances characterized by disparities in treatment, enforcement, and possibilities for meaningful engagement.…”

Leveraging environmental assessment and environmental justice to deliver equitable, decarbonized built infrastructure

“…There are gaps in how climate change mitigation, resilience, and dimensions of equity are integrated into infrastructure planning frameworks, necessitating a need for standardization. Environmental impact assessment (EIA) methods are used by stakeholders to evaluate the environmental, social, and economic costs and benefits from infrastructure planning decisions; however, climate change is only formally considered in EIA frameworks for a handful of countries and more attention is often paid to climate change mitigation rather than adaptation [19]. A review of how climate change has been integrated into EIA planning in the United States reveals variance in how well impacts, mitigation strategies, and adaptation plans are described by infrastructure type (e.g.…”

“…A review of how climate change has been integrated into EIA planning in the United States reveals variance in how well impacts, mitigation strategies, and adaptation plans are described by infrastructure type (e.g. transportation, water system, etc) and how well-suited current EIA frameworks are for addressing global cumulative climate change impacts [19]. Current planning processes and mechanisms will need to be transformed to achieve 'climate-smart' infrastructure that focus on thoughtful minimization of impacts, cooperation with communities, and understanding the implications of failing to act [20].…”