Citation:

Sharpe, L., S. Jenkins, J. King, AND C. Thorson. Final Ecosystem Goods and Services (FEGS) Scoping Tool. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, 2021.

Impact/Purpose:

The FEGS Scoping Tool informs the early stage of decision-making, when decision makers are aware of a decision they need to make, but before any actions are taken. The tool helps users identify and prioritize stakeholders, beneficiaries, and environmental attributes (i.e., aspects of the environment) through a structured, transparent, and repeatable process. These relevant and meaningful environmental attributes can then be used to evaluate decision alternatives. The tool is transferrable across a wide range of decision contexts allowing it to be used in the scoping phase of any decision with an environmental context. 

Description:

The FEGS Scoping Tool informs the early stage of decision-making, when decision makers are aware of a decision they need to make, but before any actions are taken. The tool helps users identify and prioritize stakeholders, beneficiaries, and environmental attributes (i.e., aspects of the environment) through a structured, transparent, and repeatable process. These relevant and meaningful environmental attributes can then be used to evaluate decision alternatives. The tool is transferrable across a wide range of decision contexts allowing it to be used in the scoping phase of any decision with an environmental context. All decision makers prioritize stakeholders, whether consciously or subconsciously. This tool formalizes and records the stakeholder prioritization process, making those priorities transparent. Decision makers can use prioritization process results to systematically identify environmental attributes most relevant to the prioritized stakeholders. A formal and transparent prioritization process also allows constituents to see what perspectives were most influential to the decision and why. The FEGS Scoping Tool recognizes that community decisions are complex and environmental decision criteria are both relevant and hard to identify. The goal of the FEGS Scoping Tool is to provide a transparent, repeatable, defendable approach for selecting relevant environmental attributes as decision criteria.  

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