Final Ecosystem Goods and Services (FEGS) Scoping Tool
EPA announced the availability of the final report, Final Ecosystem Goods and Services Scoping Tool Analysis of Beneficiaries and Environmental Attributes for the Tillamook River Wetlands Project.
EPA researchers are developing resources and tools to help communities incorporate the benefits of local ecosystems into their environmental decisions and planning. One such tool is the Final Ecosystems Goods and Services (FEGS) Scoping Tool.
About the Tool
The FEGS Scoping Tool provides a structured, transparent, and repeatable process for identifying and prioritizing stakeholders, the ways those stakeholders benefit from the environment, and the aspects of the environment necessary to realize those benefits. It uses multiple criteria to analyze decisions that involve FEGS and weights those criteria and ranks the alternatives in order to help make better decisions.
Designed as a first step in the decision-making and planning process, this tool provides input before any actions are taken and helps decision makers take a holistic and comprehensive view of the ecosystem services that may be relevant to the context of their decision. It is easily transferrable among a wide range of decision contexts and could be used in the scoping phase of any decision with an environmental context.
The FEGS Scoping Tool helps users identify meaningful environmental attributes for use in evaluating decision alternatives, but does not provide additional guidance in selecting the preferred decision alternative.
Related Publications:
Who Should Use the Tool
The tool should be particularly valuable to community decision makers, including those working to remediate and rehabilitate contaminated sites, and urban and other land use planners. No technical expertise is necessary to use the tool, only familiarity with the community and its stakeholder groups.
Benefits of Using the Tool
Community decisions are complex and rely on incorporating relevant environmental criteria and that are often hard to identify, particularly when they involve ecosystem related goods and services. The goal of the FEGS Scoping Tool is to address those challenges.
The tool provides a transparent, repeatable, and defendable approach for selecting relevant environmental attributes in the context of decision making. It guides users through a formal, transparent, and recorded stakeholder prioritization process.
Decision makers can then use the results of that process to systematically identify the most relevant environmental attributes to the community, and subsequently provide a clear picture of what perspectives were most influential to the decision and why.
Installation and Technical Contact
System Requirements:
- The FEGS Scoping Tool is compatible with Windows 7 or later.
- The hardware requirements are SSE2 capable Intel Pentium 4 processor or later and 512 MB of RAM.
How to Install:
- Download the Installation and User Manual files to your computer.
- Select the FEGS Scoping Tool.exe icon that appears on the desktop window.
Technical Contact: Leah Sharpe, sharpe.leah@epa.gov