Better Environmental Permitting

Government staff issue categorical exclusion paperwork every 5 minutes, publish a new Environmental Analysis every 30 minutes, and issue a new Environmental Impact Statement every 2 days. That's just under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The Army Corps publishes a Clean Water Act permit notice every 30 minutes. This work load is crushing too many people and projects, and it doesn't facilitate public input—there are so many things to look at that the public does not and cannot pay attention to most.

Meetings in Washington DC last week shone a light on these problems and ideas on how to fix them.

First, it was a privilege to join the Danish Ambassador to the U.S., Jesper Møller Sørensen, Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council (FPISC) Chief of Staff Rebecca Higgins, cBrain, the Danish Environmental Portal (Danmarks Miljøportal), Anne-Louise F. Christensen, Senior Commercial Advisor for Water at the Embassy, and many US agencies and companies for a morning workshop on opportunities to accelerate environmental permitting with cutting edge technologies.

The next day, the National Academies of Science, Network for Engineering with Nature, Duke University Nicholas Institute, and many others also hosted sessions on ecological restoration and green infrastructure permitting at their Policy Forum on Nature Based solutions. (Find the webcast here!)

Here are a few of the highlights and take aways for me:

1. Our permitting laws treat every project as guilty of causing future environmental damage until proven innocent. That is a ridiculous framing for projects designed to restore nature. Many types of environmental restoration shouldn't have a categorical exclusion or a general permit.. .they simply shouldn't require a permit. A licensed electrician can install an outlet in my house without a permit, despite the risk of fire or electrocution if they get it wrong. We need new processes that allow teams with a history of successful restoration to do future projects with less procedural review. Categories of projects should be excluded from any review by default unless permitters make specific evidence-based cases within a deadline for reviewing individual projects. California has taken steps in this direction, but only for state permit processes.

2. NEPA documents (usually Environmental Impact Statements) have a long history of winning and losing in court. AI trained on past judicial rulings could be used to screen draft EISs to estimate the risk of a future loss in court, allowing drafters to produce better final analyses.

3. Denmark has digitized all its Environmental Impact Statements (2,000+) and unified 800 environmental datasets into a single digital resource that can be used to write better permit documents for any project—America could do that too. We just need to agree on the first few steps. With 2 days' work, the Danish company, cBrain, was even able to digitize two dozen US impact statements, import them into their Danish system and use machine learning to find accurate similarities and differences across the documents - even though their program was only trained on documents developed under Danish laws!

4. Creation of intra-agency and inter-agency permit teams sounds like a step in the wrong direction to anyone who hasn't worked in government, but is actually one of the better solutions that can be applied. That’s because putting teams of either a) senior leaders together to make hard decisions on dozens of permit steps or b) teams of low or mid-level staff together to shift culture toward having shared expectations of one another on deadlines and paperwork can significantly improve decisions and timelines. Individual bias or interest in the project has a huge impact on the speed and depth of a review - team structures can help change that bias to create a process that is more objective.

5. Someone said, “permit processes are where environmental data goes to die.” Too often, this is accurate. Agencies need to start requiring that all data developed for environmental permit analyses, at least for projects on public lands, be provided in a way that is consistent with FAIR principles as a condition of being eligible for a contract to carry out the analyses for government. Agencies simultaneously need to develop a system or systems to make this data useful.

6. Permitting-related hiring initiatives need to be coupled with other reforms or staffing will just facilitate expansions of processes and workload. One of the most frequent permitting reforms proposed is “hire more staff.” I’m not sure there is any evidence that this allows agencies to get a handle on current processes and workload. For example, using technology to pull data resources together, manage workflow, and pull together the most relevant past analyses to use on future ones can all save time and negate some of the need for new staff.

Lastly, working with EPIC’s Becca Madsen, this 2-pager attempts to categorize the types of permitting reforms that are underway at federal and state levels around the country (and overseas). Why is this important? We aren't spending enough time thinking about the specific problems that a proposed solution will potentially solve, or the tradeoffs involved, nor are parallel efforts that are happening at local, state, national, and international levels aware of each other. Networking common efforts together can help otherwise isolated reformers learn about what is working and what is not across efforts to improve permitting around the planet.

I hope we can play a bigger role in the future in collaborating with others to make all these things happen.

As the comparison above illustrates, hiring more staff is an expensive solution, and the least threatening to current power structures.