The challenge of inducing risk reduction and adaptation practice is not a purely environmental one, but the vast impacts of acute and chronic environmental events and changes associated with climate change extend across socioeconomic landscapes. Elevated environmental hazards to communities are increasingly present with severe storms, both inland and coastal. Should a set of conditions evolve to accommodate this challenge, Financial Assurance Mandates could prove to be a valuable option to reduce risks.

Just as our coasts have been defined and shaped by their surrounding lands and waters, the future scale and scope of climate change impacts in any one location will—in part—be defined by geography and surrounding landscape. Zachary Arnold presents a case for how Financial Assurance Mandates (FAMs) such as insurance or surety bonding could be utilized effectively to reduce the risk communities face from climate-driven impacts that result in coastal industrial disasters.

Zachary Arnold’s proposal of a policy framework to prevent coastal industrial disasters is quite timely, coming as it does after the 2017 hurricane season on the East Coast, followed by the equally devastating wildfire season in the West. Arnold suggests that imposing financial assurance mandates (FAMs), such as minimum insurance coverage, would induce coastal industries to proactively manage climate adaptation, and thus, proactively manage risk. Arnold points out that government at all levels—local, state, and federal—could do more.

Zachary Arnold’s article on financial assurance mandates (FAMs) highlights an important issue of growing urgency: the exposure of industrial facilities—-many with toxic products or by-products—to risks of flooding exacerbated by sea-level rise and storm surge.

Financial assurance mandates (FAMs) may help induce coastal industries to invest in climate change adaptation. FAMs require companies to prove that they can pay for the liabilities they may incur—whether by drawing on their own resources or by bringing in a third party, such as an insurer or surety, to pick up the tab. FAMs are familiar tools whose strengths have been demonstrated in practice as well as in theory.

The Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review (ELPAR) is published by the Environmental Law Reporter in partnership with Vanderbilt University Law School. ELPAR provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of some of the most creative and feasible environmental law and policy proposals from the legal academic literature each year.

The illicit and illegal use of water to grow marijuana is an environmental problem that has plagued the recently legalized crop for decades. Because growing marijuana has consistently been a more visible crime than theft and diversion of the water used, the industry’s environmental crimes have largely been ignored until recently.

Reducing the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% from 1990 levels by 2050 will require multiple legal pathways for changing its transportation fuel sources. The Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project (DDPP) authors characterize transforming the transportation system as part of a third pillar of fundamental changes required in the U.S. energy system: “fuel switching of end uses to electricity and other low-carbon supplies.” The goal is to shift 80%-95% of the miles driven from gasoline to energy sources like electricity and hydrogen.

The Brasilia Declaration of Judges on Water Justice, adopted at the eighth World Water Forum in Brasilia on March 21, 2018, recognizes that water justice involves environmental stewardship, intergenerational equity, sustainable ecological systems, customary rights, the prevention and precautionary principles, the in dubio pro natura principle, the internalization of external environmental costs (including the polluter-pays and the user-pays principles), good governance, holistic approaches involving integration of environmental factors, and procedural water justice.

This Comment analyzes Union of Concerned Scientists v. Pruitt by providing relevant background and then examining the four specific claims put forth in the suit. Ultimately, based upon this analysis, the Comment concludes that Pruitt’s conflict-of-interest policy is arbitrary and capricious. As such, the conflict-of-interest policy contained in Pruitt's October 31, 2017, directive should be vacated, declared arbitrary and capricious, remanded to the Agency for coherent explanation, and any Agency actions based upon it enjoined.