News & Media
News
Read on Udall
Center News
UArizona Environmental Policy and Data Science Team Invited to White House Tech Summit
The UArizona team developing NEPAccess participated in the first-ever White House Environmental Permitting Technology and Data Summit (Summit) on October 24, 2023.
Read more.
How the debt deal would modernize Nixon-era NEPA reviews
President Joe Biden signed the debt ceiling deal, known as the Fiscal Responsibility Act, into law, and in the process approved $500,000 in funding for the White House Council on Environmental Quality to explore a unified online portal to track National Environmental Policy Act reviews.
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Local Opinion: Data Science, history point to a more sustainable Arizona
by Laura López-Hoffman, Marc L. Miller, Sudha Ram, and Jonathan Derbridge
As the U.S. makes a $1.2 trillion infrastructure investment, including many projects in Arizona, environmental impact statements will spring up like roadside summer poppies. Read more.
Read on Environmental News
Inspired by Data Science, Team Aims to Fulfill the Promise of NEPA Environmental Goals
An interdisciplinary UArizona team has developed a new platform that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to search and analyze thousands of documents stemming from the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
Videos & Podcasts
HIGHLIGHTS Video
Washington D.C. Conference:
Fulfilling NEPA's Vision Through
21st Century Data Science
On Friday, September 24, 2021, the NEPAccess team hosted a session as part of the University of Arizona Washington, DC Center for Outreach & Collaboration’s inaugural week.
Brenda Mallory, Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) addressed the event, followed by a panel discussion and a break-out session with participation from in-person and online attendees representing federal agencies and higher education.
CEQ Chair Brenda Mallory speaks at the public launch of NEPAccess.org
Video
What is NEPAaccess?
This 5-minute animated video begins in 1969 with an almost unanimous US Congress passing NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, into law. Since then over 40,000 environmental impact statements have been created under NEPA. These documents contain valuable data that can streamline the NEPA process and enable new research to be done. But they have been difficult or impossible to find–until now.
Video
The Student Team
Radio / podcast
Interview: Academia and Big Data
The National Association of Environmental Professional’s Radio features an interview with NEPAccess team leaders Laura López-Hoffman and Aaron Lien.
Video
Students explain NEPA
The work of University of Arizona undergraduate students has been critical to the NEPAccess project. Besides the time-consuming tasks of finding and cataloging EIS documents as we build our database, they are helping to develop the machine learning tools used to analyze NEPA documents. In order to train the algorithms, students are categorizing and labelling documents manually.
