Litigation over national forest management has received substantial attention from members of Congress who claim that “environmental obstructionists” are abusing the legal system; conversely, litigants criticize the U.S. Forest Service’s practice of collaborative management as insufficiently protective, leaving courts as the best resort. The authors review the emergence and increasing use of collaboration and some of the claims and counterclaims regarding Forest Service litigation.

Fragile but economically, culturally, and ecologically important, Louisiana’s wetlands comprise 40% of all wetlands in the United States, but its wetland loss is 80% percent of the national total. The state loses the equivalent of a football field of wetlands to the Gulf of Mexico every hour—this, despite a decades-old national policy calling for “no net loss” of wetlands. The United States has a complex wetlands-protection regime that purports to protect wetlands, but instead has resulted in irreversible destruction of natural wetlands.

China and the United States deserve a great deal of credit for the successful outcome at the Paris Climate Agreement talks. Their landmark 2014 agreement committing each nation to reduce emissions and promote cleaner energy sources inspired a record number of nations to submit their intended nationally determined contributions to climate mitigation and adaptation.

A coalition of states, utilities, energy producers, and other industry groups has brought a challenge in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan (CPP), which limits carbon dioxide emissions from the nation’s existing power plants pursuant to CAA §111(d).

Environmental law, with its intricate layers of international, federal, state, and local laws, is more established than its animal counterpart. Yet animal law faces many of the same legal and strategic challenges that environmental law faced in seeking to establish a more secure foothold, both in the United States and abroad. In What Can Animal Law Learn From Environmental Law?, editor Randall S.

This Article is adapted from Chapter Fourteen of Rethinking Sustainability to Meet the Climate Change Challenge, edited by Jessica Owley and Keith Hirokawa and published by ELI Press. The author responds to critics of the concept of sustainability, and argues for its continued relevance by identifying a functional definition of sustainability as a framework for managing change.

This Article is adapted from Chapter Four of Rethinking Sustainability to Meet the Climate Change Challenge, edited by Jessica Owley and Keith Hirokawa and published by ELI Press. The author argues that climate change adaptation is absolutely necessary because we have passed the point of avoiding climate change impacts.

Many practitioners and scholars view enhanced permit coordination as beneficial due to purported efficiency gains and potentially better conservation outcomes, but scholarship on interagency coordination is still limited. The authors conducted extensive interviews and dialogue sessions to evaluate a range of efforts to coordinate proposed California Habitat Conservation Plans/ Natural Community Conservation Plans with freshwater aquatic resource permits under federal and state laws.

The increased need for government-driven coastal resilience projects will lead to a growing number of claims for “partial takings” of coastal property. Much attention has been paid to what actions constitute a partial taking, but there is less clarity about how to calculate just compensation for such takings, and when compensation should be offset by the value of benefits conferred to the property owner. While the U.S. Supreme Court has an analytically consistent line of cases on compensation for partial takings, it has repeatedly failed (most recently in Horne v. U.S.

When the government decides to approve, or not to approve, some activity that has climate change impacts, who has standing to bring a legal challenge? Answers are tricky and, ultimately, unsatisfying. What is clear is that the sheer number of cases presenting this question is increasing, and there is every reason to believe that this trend will accelerate into the future.