Improving Environmental Analysis and Decision Making
Here are some of the things we’re doing to be more responsive to the American people in ways that are timelier and less costly.
The USDA Forest Service conducts environmental analysis using the best available science and, based on the analysis and other relevant information, makes decisions to increase the diversity, health, resilience, and productivity of our national forests and grasslands. In September 2017, the Forest Service launched an agency-wide effort to improve processes associated with environmental analysis and decision making.
Environmental Analysis and Decision Making (EADM) is a change effort that intends to reduce the time and cost of our environmental analysis and decision making processes to produce efficient, effective, and high quality land management decisions to accomplish more work on the ground and be more responsive to the public we serve.
EADM is part of a broader USDA Forest Service effort to create more resilient landscapes and better serve the public by focusing our land management efforts across boundaries and modernizing our internal processes. We are modernizing our forest products program to improve efficiency in how we manage forests, deliver forest products, and carry out timber sales; improving systems to efficiently manage permits for outfitting and guiding, concession campgrounds and communication sites; and sharing stewardship of the land by working with states, partners and tribes to choose the right tools, in the right places and at the appropriate scale. EADM supports these efforts by increasing the efficiency of environmental analysis and decision-making procedures.
Thanks to the feedback and perspectives offered by partners during a series of roundtable discussions in Spring 2018, we were able to prioritize and identify the highest-priority actions for modernizing our environmental analysis processes. Since then, EADM has made progress in implementing recommended solutions across three primary focus areas: