Adapting the environmental impact statement process to inform decision makers

The environmental impact statement (EIS) process is central to the assessment of environmentally significant actions. Yet decisions about what matters in the environment and what gets studied as part of an EIS are based on values that are largely implicit and come primarily from technical experts. In this article we propose using the techniques of decision analysis (DA) to articulate values explicitly and make the EIS process more effective as an aid to decisionmakers in developing defensible environmental policies. We identify five major sources of problems with the current EIS approach, propose a new environmental decision process that incorporates DA in the EIS framework, and consider the merits, problems, and feasibility of implementing the suggested policy improvements.