Most NEPA research workflows are too slow for real-world decision cycles. Teams spend hours digging through precedent records, reconciling differences across agencies, and extracting patterns under deadline pressure. I built NEPA.tools to compress that cycle without lowering analytical rigor.
The problem
Environmental planning teams often face the same bottlenecks:
- precedent research spread across disconnected sources,
- limited visibility into comparable projects by category and agency,
- slow shortlist creation for internal review,
- and fragile handoff workflows when teams need defensible records.
In regulated environments, speed without structure creates risk. But structure without speed can kill momentum.
What NEPA.tools does
NEPA.tools is designed to help teams identify and compare federal NEPA precedents faster.
Core capabilities include:
- filtering by document category (CE, EA, EIS),
- querying by lead agency, location, sector, and project type,
- shortlisting and side-by-side comparison,
- full-text review, and
- export options for downstream analysis and documentation.
The current implementation uses a large precedent corpus (120,000+ records across 60+ agencies) for practical search and triage workflows.
Why this matters for CEQA.ai
This project reflects the operating principle behind CEQA.ai:
Use AI and data systems to increase planning throughput while preserving defensibility.
That means building tools that help professionals answer the real questions faster:
- What has already been done in comparable contexts?
- Which agencies and project profiles are most relevant?
- Where are the likely risk and scrutiny points?
- How do we document decisions with traceable evidence?
Data source
NEPA.tools is built on NEPATEC 2.0 (PNNL) public-domain data.
Who this is for
The primary users are:
- environmental planners,
- permitting and compliance teams,
- legal/policy analysts,
- and public-sector operators modernizing review workflows.
If you’re working at the intersection of environmental policy and implementation operations, this is exactly the kind of system I’m building more of.
Explore: https://nepa.tools