Federal Highway Administration 2017 Environmental Excellence Awards
Categories
Thank you for your interest in the FHWA 2017 Environmental Excellence Awards. Below please find the categories and criteria for the 2017 cycle, which closed September 30, 2016. Please direct questions to EEAwardsNomination@dot.gov.
ORGANIZATION AND PROCESS INNOVATION
Accelerating Project Delivery
- Successfully deploys streamlining innovations from FHWA or administration initiatives (e.g., Every Day Counts)
- Improves the efficiency of environmental review and permitting, while concurrently maintaining protection for the environment
- Demonstrates reduced project and process delays
- Increases amount and range of public involvement
- Integrates and enhances interagency coordination and collaboration
- Provides improved practices for use in future projects
Collaboration and Partnership
- Involves at least three agencies from a range of sectors [including public, private (including public-private partnerships), and non-profit] working together to achieve an environmentally or community friendly outcome
- Demonstrates a commitment to interagency partnerships for projects, policies, or programs
- Encourages innovative and collaborative thinking to resolve natural or human environmental issues
- Engages interested stakeholders by using a creative and inclusive approach
Educational and Training Programs
- Educates the public in a creative, understandable manner
- Informs individuals about issues, changes, or challenges that are needed to improve the natural and human environments
- Focuses on environmental education that connects kids with nature, education about the interaction between the human environment and the natural environment, or efforts to increase cultural awareness
- Promotes understanding of the transportation decisionmaking process or key parts of the process with nontraditional training techniques targeted for varied ages and abilities
Environmental Leadership
- Is a person, group, or organization
- Demonstrates a commitment to integrating natural- or human-environment considerations into their organization's structure and function
- Creates initiatives that enhance the natural or human environment
Environmental Research
- Advances state-of-the-art knowledge of transportation and its effects on the natural environment, neighborhoods, and communities
- Develops or advances tools that support integrated approaches for transportation decisionmaking
- Benefits the human or natural environment, or saves money
Programmatic Agreements
- Demonstrates a novel approach to improve environmental outcomes for a specific species or habitat
- Demonstrates a commitment to collaboration between State departments of transportation, MPOs, and resource and regulatory agencies
- Recognizes a newly established or existing programmatic agreement that has brought quantifiable streamlining benefits to the agencies involved
- Improves project planning and delivery processes
- Demonstrates or quantifies the economic benefits of the programmatic process
NATURAL ENVIRONMENT
Air Quality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions
- Institutes new methods or partnerships to track or increase emissions reductions of air pollutants or greenhouse gases from mobile sources
- Integrates environmental concerns into regional planning and project development
- Encourages and builds interagency partnerships, and creates proactive public involvement
- Fosters creative solutions to meeting air quality challenges
- Implements innovative measures to reduce mobile-source emissions
Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience
- Demonstrates integration of climate change adaptation and resilience considerations into the organization’s decisionmaking
- Integrates climate change adaptation and resilience into regional planning and project development
- Demonstrates or promotes innovative approaches to improving the resilience of transportation projects
- Encourages and builds interagency partnerships, and creates proactive public involvement in pursuing a climate resilient transportation system and community
- Demonstrates comprehensive consideration of the needs of all community members, including the mobility of traditionally underserved members (carless, disabled, elderly, low-income, etc.), during adaptation and resilience planning, particularly in emergency preparedness transportation plans
Ecosystems, Habitat, and Wildlife
- Promotes innovative and emerging techniques that restore and preserve ecosystem integrity and function
- Integrates response to ecosystem and habitat concerns into planning and project development
- Forms partnerships to inventory, monitor, and manage resources
- Demonstrates mitigation success through monitoring and performance measurement
Roadside Resource Management and Maintenance
- Promotes integrated management and maintenance methods that result in high quality, sustainable roadside environments
- Promotes native natural vegetation, habitats, and pollinator health
- Demonstrates environmental protection aspects of maintenance activities
- Demonstrates or promotes economic efficiency in roadside activities
- Adopts and uses innovative designs and materials for noise barriers
Wetlands, Watersheds, and Water Quality
- Promotes innovative and emerging techniques or technologies for stormwater management in a watershed
- Promotes innovative approaches to improving Best Management Practices (BMPs) for safeguarding water quality
- Promotes watershed, geographic, ecosystem, or regional approaches for wetland and stream mitigation
- Promotes innovative approach for stormwater quality banking or trading
HUMAN ENVIRONMENT
Community Considerations in Transportation Improvements
- Demonstrates a commitment to community health in the development of policies, project development, or programming (e.g., has created health-equity-driven performance measures or project-selection criteria)
- Fosters community involvement in the identification of transportation impacts and possible mitigation of those impacts
- Demonstrates commitment to the human environment [23 U.S.C. 109(h)] through the consideration of social and economic impacts and community cohesion during transportation planning and project development.
- Identifies and offers solutions to improve access to opportunities in communities that were disconnected and isolated due to previous highway and transportation projects
Context Sensitive Solutions
- Uses a shared, stakeholder vision to provide a basis for decisions
- Fosters early and continuing public and agency communication and collaboration to achieve consensus
- Exercises flexibility and creativity to shape effective transportation solutions, while preserving and enhancing the community and natural environments
- Seeks mobility solutions and project designs and mitigation that are context appropriate where a federally funded action is proposed
- Supports growth in employment, personal incomes, business establishments, and property values
Cultural and Historic Resources
- Enhances our understanding of heritage and maintains a sense of place
- Provides economic opportunities and supports heritage tourism development, and informs complementary community development
- Provides innovative opportunities for integrating historic-resource considerations early in planning and project development
- Displays sensitivity to historic, cultural, and community values identified by engaging the community in the process
Demonstrated Advances in Nondiscrimination, Including Environmental Justice
- Builds agency consensus in developing varied approaches to planning and project-development strategies that improve the quality of life of all protected populations, including minority and low-income individuals
- Seeks ways to enhance the livability principles by integrating the concerns of all protected populations, including minority and low-income individuals, into the analysis of proposed projects
- Demonstrates a commitment to mitigate or improve cumulative past or reasonably foreseeable future negative environmental-justice impacts that affected or will affect quality of life
- Demonstrates program activities that improve EJ implementation through better data collection and better linking of planning to NEPA
Nonmotorized and Multimodal Transportation
- Increases the number and extent of pedestrian or bicycle networks
- Promotes access for people with disabilities, the elderly, and children
- Promotes livable communities and builds partnerships
- Links nonmotorized networks to other transportation options
- Demonstrates strong partnerships for increasing nonmotorized and multimodal transportation opportunities
