Environment & Land Use

207 posts

India’s Federal and Regional Governments May Not Ignore Disastrous Drought Conditions: Indian Supreme Court

Justin Gundlach Climate Law Fellow In an opinion issued on May 11, 2016, a two-judge panel of India’s Supreme Court chastised that country’s federal and regional governments for their recent responses to severe droughts, which the Court said contravene key provisions of the National Disaster Mitigation Act of 2005 (DM […]

Florida Government Responses to Sea Level Rise: New Sabin Center Working Paper

by David Markell David Sive Visiting Scholar, fall 2016 The legal environment for local government in Florida is beginning to change when it comes to sea-level rise (sometimes referred to as SLR). Innovations in institutional structure and governance strategies are underway in the State as well. This paper, Sea-Level Rise […]

Upstream and Downstream Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Fossil Fuel Production and Transportation: New Working Paper Examines Scope of Federal Analysis Required under NEPA

The Sabin Center has recently posted a working paper, Downstream and Upstream Greenhouse Gas Emissions: The Proper Scope of NEPA Review.  The paper was co-authored by Executive Director Michael Burger and Associate Director and Fellow Jessica Wentz and will be published in the Fall 2016 edition of the Harvard Environmental […]

BOEM Ignores Downstream Emissions and Social Cost of Carbon in EIS for Outer Continental Shelf Leasing Program

Jessica Wentz Associate Director and Fellow Yesterday, the Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management (BOEM) released the Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (DPEIS) for the 2017-2022 Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Oil and Gas Leasing Program. The DPEIS accounts for the impacts of climate change on program activities. It does not, […]

Attributing Weather Events to Climate Change—the National Academies of Science Weighs in

Justin Gundlach Climate Law Fellow Over the past decade, as the scientific consensus about the fact and nature of anthropogenic climate change has solidified, extreme weather events have destroyed enormous sums of assets, infrastructure investments, and large numbers of human lives. Set against the backdrop of climate change, these events […]

Accounting for Climate Change in Federal Environmental Impact Statements – New Report and Database

The Sabin Center has just published a new report on the consideration of climate change in federal Environmental Impact Statements (EISs) prepared under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The report describes the results from a survey of 238 federal EISs published from July 2012 through December 2014. The survey […]

The Supreme Court Stay of the Clean Power Plan and the Paris Pledges

Michael B. Gerrard Faculty Director The Supreme Court’s unprecedented, unexpected and unexplained action yesterday staying implementation of the Clean Power Plan is one of the most environmentally harmful judicial actions of all time. However, the damage it does to the United States’ ability to meet its Paris pledge is less […]