The D.C. Circuit granted in part and denied in part petitions to review a Surface Transportation Board order authorizing construction and operation of a new rail line in the Uinta Basin. Environmental groups and a Colorado county argued the Board failed to take a "hard look" at environmental impacts...
A district court granted in part and denied in part environmental groups' motion for summary judgment in a challenge to BLM's 2020 decision to allow grazing in the Sonoran Desert National Monument. The groups argued the Bureau's amended resource management plan (RMP) violated FLPMA and the National ...
The Fourth Circuit granted federal agencies' and Mountain Valley Pipeline proponents' motion to dismiss challenges to agency actions that would enable final construction and initial operation of the 303-mile natural gas pipeline from West Virginia to Virginia. Environmental groups had petitioned the...
The California Supreme Court affirmed an appellate court ruling in favor of oil producers and mineral rights holders in a challenge to a county ordinance banning oil and gas wastewater injection and impoundment and drilling of new oil and gas wells. The plaintiffs argued the ordinance was preempted ...
A district court denied environmental groups' motion for summary judgment in a challenge to the Forest Service's approval of a gold exploration project in Caribou-Targhee National Forest. The groups argued the Service violated NEPA by failing to take a "hard look" at the potential effects exploratio...
A district court denied summary judgment for oil and gas leasing proponents and the state of Alaska in a challenge to President Biden's Executive Order No. 13990 and actions DOI took to implement the order's directive to place a temporary moratorium on implementation of a leasing program in the Arct...
The Tenth Circuit affirmed a district court ruling upholding BLM's approval of a development project on state and federal land in southwestern Wyoming. Conservation groups argued BLM violated NEPA by failing to adequately consider impacts of the project on sage-grouse populations and pronghorn antel...
The Seventh Circuit affirmed summary judgment for the Army Corps of Engineers in a challenge to its decision to continue an over century-old project that involves building river training structures to maintain the navigable channel in the Middle Mississippi River. Environmental groups argued that th...
In How Algorithm-Assisted Decisionmaking Is Influencing Environmental Law and Climate Adaptation, Ziaja provides a useful framework to analyze whether an algorithm-assisted decisionmaking (AADM) tool and its design process is procedurally equitable. Ziaja’s framework contains several different questions advocacy groups can use to analyze the AADM tools that are increasingly used for environmental resource governance, such as the INFORM and RESOLVE algorithms discussed in the article, which guide the allocation and distribution of water and energy resources.
Environmental, natural resource, and energy planning will continue to rely on increasingly complex algorithms. Are these processes then also doomed to be inaccessible to key stakeholders? Hopefully not. There are multiple steps to ensuring process and participatory equity. There is ease of access to the process, access to necessary information, and then there is the matter of having the right information to be able to meaningfully impact outcomes of algorithm-assisted decisionmaking processes.