Environmental planning, hazards, and resilience

Learning objectives

• Walk through the NEPA process from categorical exclusion to record of decision.
• Explain brownfields and the purpose and contents of a Phase I environmental site assessment.
• Describe floodplain basics (the floodway and flood fringe, flood zones, and the substantial improvement rule), the National Flood Insurance Program, and hazard mitigation planning under the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000.
• Put the four phases of emergency management in order and tell mitigation from preparedness.
• Distinguish climate mitigation from adaptation, and explain resilience and managed retreat.
• Apply green infrastructure, wetland protection, and wildland-urban interface strategies.
• Summarize the Endangered Species Act, NPDES permits and TMDLs, coastal zone management, and Superfund as they affect local planning.
• Explain how communities plan for recovery before and after a disaster.

Key concepts

Environmental review under NEPA

The National Environmental Policy Act requires federal agencies to consider environmental effects before acting. It applies to projects with a federal nexus: federal funding, permits, or land. The process scales with a project's significance:

1. Categorical exclusion (CE): actions that normally have no significant effects (for example, many minor repairs) skip detailed review.
2. Environmental assessment (EA): a concise analysis to decide whether effects could be significant. It ends in either a finding of no significant impact (FONSI) or a decision to prepare an EIS.
3. Environmental impact statement (EIS): required for major federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment. The steps are a notice of intent, scoping (defining the issues and alternatives, with public input), a draft EIS analyzing a reasonable range of alternatives, including no action, a public comment period, a final EIS, and a record of decision (ROD).

NEPA is procedural: it requires study and disclosure, not the least harmful choice. The Supreme Court underlined that in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County (2025): courts should give agencies substantial deference on how deep and wide a review goes, and an agency needn't study the effects of separate projects it doesn't control, such as development upstream or downstream of a rail line. The details now vary by agency: in 2025 the Council on Environmental Quality withdrew the government-wide NEPA regulations, and each federal agency follows its own procedures. The three levels of review above still come from the statute itself, which since 2023 also sets deadlines and page limits (generally one year and 75 pages for an EA, two years and 150 pages for an EIS). Many states have their own environmental review laws, some of which reach local decisions.

10 more sections follow in the full lesson.