New White House guidance aims to improve transparency and mitigate environmental, climate harms
We need to start thinking of public lands as a climate solution
Robert S. Donnovan
The Wilderness Society applauds White House guidance to disclose climate impacts in environmental reviews
Today, the White House released important new guidance requiring full disclosure and analysis of climate impacts in environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The Wilderness Society applauded this news as an important step.
“Today’s interim guidance represents an important step in the right direction to reinforce the requirements that federal agencies place the impacts of climate change on vulnerable communities and our shared public lands and resources front-and-center in decision-making,” said Alison Flint, Senior Legal Director for The Wilderness Society. “We applaud the White House in recognizing that federal agencies must make decisions that are informed by the urgency of the climate crisis and the needs of communities. Next the White House must move forward with enshrining this guidance and other important requirements of NEPA in federal environmental regulations.”
The public process and environmental review mandated by NEPA represent the bedrocks of environmental decision-making. Full analysis of the direct, indirect, and cumulative effects of climate change is central to compliance with the law. This means considering both the foreseeable lifecycle of greenhouse-gas emissions from a proposed action and a range of reasonable alternatives to that action, as well as full consideration of the impacts climate change is already having and will continue to have on the environment and the communities.
The science is unequivocal: human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are fueling climate change and immediate action is needed to avert the worst effects of global warming. This guidance comes at a time when the administration has set ambitious climate goals, including reducing the nations' emissions by 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
Contacts:
Alison Flint, Senior Legal Director, The Wilderness Society, alison_flint@tws.org, (720) 647- 9491
Tony Iallonardo, Director for Media Engagement, The Wilderness Society, newsmedia@tws.org, (202) 429-2699
