The National Environmental Policy Act, known as NEPA, is one of the most influential pieces of American environmental law. NEPA doesn’t enforce any standards for specific sources of pollution like the Clean Water Act does for water. Instead, NEPA imposes procedural standards on agencies during the decision-making process. In this lesson you’ll learn the basic structure of NEPA and agency requirements under NEPA.

NEPA is considered a stop-and-think statute because there’s an emphasis placed...